Tangier: A Novel

by Stephen Holgate

  “I’ll still need money.”

  Torrence looked away and began to tap his fingers on the table again.

  “Michel, I need your help.”

  Torrence refused to look at him. “Find out how much you need.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “How would I know? What you need is someone who can make inquiries for you. If you go blundering around the docks asking the price of an illegal passage to Portugal, someone will turn you over to the Guardia Civil for the price of a beer.”

  Feeling the shadow of a prison cell creep over him, Laurent tilted his chair back. “But who do I know in this city besides you who’d be willing to—” He brought the legs of his chair back down and looked at Torrence, a faint smile on his lips. “It’s all right. I think I have someone.”

  TEN

  The sandwich boards on the rue es Siaghines displayed slightly different values than they had the previous day, like the changing score of a soccer match still in progress.

  This time the face behind the beaded curtain was that of a young boy. Before he could think to run away as his sister had, the money-changer brushed through the doorway, smiling broadly. “Ah, Monsieur Laurent, back already.” He wagged a finger at Laurent as he sat down behind his table. “Have you spent everything I gave you yesterday?”

  The Moroccan’s manner, which had amused Laurent when they first met, now only aggravated him. He didn’t trust the man any more than he trusted anyone else on the street, but he was at least a known quantity.

  “Gave me? You gave me nothing. It was a business transaction.”

  The man nodded, conceding the point.

  “Now I’m in need of a different kind of service.”

  The shift in the man’s posture—a keenness in the eye, the phony smile forgotten for a moment—told Laurent he had the man’s attention.

  “So you turn to your old friend, Mohammed Laoui.” It was the first time the man had mentioned his name.

  In spite of himself, Laurent smiled. “Every time you say we’re friends I look to see if I still have my wallet. But you’re the only man I know in this city.”

  Laoui adopted a look of pained regret, but it quickly returned to a more honest expression of curiosity. “Yes. We’re grown men. We have no need to flatter each other.”

  “I need to leave Tangier.”

  “Of course.”

  Their previous conversation regarding the common desire to depart Tangier, and the equally common failure to do so occurred to both men, but only Laoui smiled at the memory.

  “I need to go to Portugal, but I can’t obtain an exit visa.”

  “You’re a diplomat. It should be a simple matter for you.”

  He sensed Laoui fishing for information he could sell.

  “I’m told I can hire a fishing boat to take me to Portugal. No doubt, this is dangerous.”

  Laoui propped his chin on his hand and looked at him. “Not really.”

  “My means are limited. But if the price is reasonable, I can find the money.”

  Laoui cocked his head dubiously. “You wish to cross to Portugal illegally in the midst of war and you wish to do it cheaply.”

  “The war is over.” Laurent meant it as a bargaining position, but, even after insisting the contrary with Torrence the previous night, he suddenly feared he was speaking the truth.

  Laoui wrote something on a pad of paper and gave him a long look. “Go back to your hotel. I will send a note to you in a day or two with a price. If it is agreeable, come see me here.” He extended his hand to seal the bargain.

  It was Laurent’s turn to pause and look into the eyes of the man on the other side of the table. They both knew there was no real decision to make. The Frenchman had no choice. Laurent shook the Moroccan’s hand. It was dry and soft, the hand of a man who had never labored for his bread. A man rather like himself.

  Over the next few days, Laurent kept to his room. He thought about Marie-Therese, worried about how she was surviving in the United States with no job and little money—and with no idea what had happened to her husband. But mostly he slept, although even that was difficult.

  The Moulay Idriss was a rundown dive near the port, frequented by French sailors and Europeans displaced by the war. They paid by the week and cooked their meals on forbidden hotplates. A few days among its residents had transformed Laurent’s liberal political sentiments, from a bloodless affection for the less fortunate to a sort of exasperated respect. The hotel smelled of beer and bad cooking and rocked with the sound of loud laughter and louder shouting. With so little to call their own, its residents risked nothing by behaving as they pleased. They raged against their fate, destroyed themselves with drinking and fighting, and would most likely die young, cursing all the way. Laurent envied them their passions even while he acted with circumspection and expressed himself civilly. Yet he knew if he were not both careful and lucky, he might also die young.

  The knock at the door startled him.

  “Yes?”

  No answer.

  Laurent rose from his bed, crossed the room and put his ear to the door.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  Again, no response.

  One fist clenched as he braced for whatever might confront him on the other side, Laurent threw the door open.

  Before him stood a boy of perhaps ten, wearing a knit cap and an open-mouthed stare. For a frozen instant they looked at each other. Then the boy thrust a piece of folded paper into Laurent’s hand and ran off without a word, dashing down the stairs two at a time.

  The Frenchman gazed down the corridor, so empty and silent that he could believe the boy had never existed but for the piece of paper in his hand. He unfolded it and read, “Three hundred pounds sterling.”

  Fewer Germans occupied the Minzah’s bar at this early hour, and Torrence appeared more relaxed as he eyed Laurent. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping well,” Laurent replied. To cut off further discussion of his state of mind, he pushed the piece of paper across the table toward his countryman.

  Torrence glanced at the figure and covered the note with his hand. “Actually, I had thought it would be more than that.”

  “Maybe he sensed I could only borrow so much.”

  “How much of it can you come up with?”

  “Forty. And that leaves me very little to make it to Lisbon.”

  Torrence whistled.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Laurent told him, hoping that Torrence felt otherwise.

  “That has occurred to me. Maybe it’s my small contribution to the side of the angels.” For an instant he flashed the broad smile Laurent had known in Brussels. “Besides, my life gets easier once you’re gone. I’ll send it to your hotel tomorrow evening. But I can’t give you sterling, only the equivalent in francs. Why are you smiling?”

  “It’s all right. I know where to change them.”

  ELEVEN

  Laurent stood in the shadows of a shuttered tavern facing a square near the Moulay Idriss and squinted again at his watch. Dawn was still two hours away. He clasped and unclasped his hands nervously. Laoui had promised to send a car to pick him up, but it was an hour late.

  The Frenchman was on the verge of giving up and returning to his hotel when headlights appeared from a street leading up from the port. A little car chugged across the square and came to a halt in front of him, bucked once and died. Laoui was driving.

  Laurent threw his suitcase in the back seat and got in. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come.”

  “Did you check out of your hotel?” Laoui asked.

  “No.”

  “Good. And you left some things behind, so they’ll think you’re still there? A few hours of uncertainty may prove invaluable.”

  “Better yet, I’m skipping out on a week’s rent. You’ve got the money for the skipper?”

  “He’s already been paid.”

  A Guardia Civil, hands in his pockets, c
arbine slung over his shoulder, crossed the darkened square. The two men in the car fell silent until he had passed.

  “Wouldn’t it have been wiser not to pay him until I was on board?”

  “Stop worrying.”

  The gearshift appeared to baffle Laoui. When Laurent offered to drive, the Moroccan happily agreed.

  “Where are we going?” Laurent asked.

  “A fishing village a few miles east of here.”

  The little sedan bounced and groaned along the dirt road, its headlight beams jumping around like a madman’s rolling eyes until Laoui accused the Frenchman of “trying to destroy this little car.”

  After an hour’s drive they arrived at a scattering of whitewashed buildings perched on a bluff above the sea. Laoui told Laurent to park in the shadows of a darkened restaurant near the edge of the bluff. The two men shut their car doors quietly and walked down a wide dirt track toward the water.

  The tiny port hardly merited the name, consisting of nothing more than a handful of tired-looking boats bobbing listlessly along a low wooden dock. As they neared the dock, Laoui nodded Laurent toward the shadows of a boarded-up shack near the water’s edge. “They’re not here yet. It’s better to wait where we won’t be seen.”

  They stood in the dark, their breath forming clouds in the chill morning air. Nothing moved. No one came. The moon sank toward the horizon. Laurent shifted his weight from one foot to the other to stay warm. “We were an hour late,” he said quietly to Laoui. “Could they have already left?”

  “Here we say, ‘I came to the café at four to see my friend at five. If he’s not here by six, I’ll leave at seven.’” Laoui’s teeth flashed in the dark. “They’ll come.”

  The moon had nearly set when Laurent heard voices and saw the dim forms of several men walking down the track from the bluff. At the bottom of the track they turned toward the dock, three men in sweaters and rough trousers. They clambered aboard a boat halfway down the dock, a single-masted vessel that sat high in the water. Two of them began to unroll the fishing nets, singing quietly. A third man, heavyset, taller than the other two, stood at the stern, his hand on the tiller, and spoke to the men rolling out the nets, who nodded and continued at their work. In a few minutes the moon would be down, the sun not yet up. The boat would be nearly invisible as it put out to sea.

  Laoui nodded to Laurent and the two men stepped out of the shadows. They had taken only a few steps when the Moroccan grabbed Laurent by the arm and pulled him back into the darkness. Laurent looked at him, puzzled. Laoui put his finger to his lips and cocked his head toward the bluffs.

  A pair of headlights had appeared at the top of the track leading down to the port. Turning slowly, the car descended the track in low gear, the motor whining as it came down the incline.

  Laurent froze, waiting for the moment when the lights would catch him standing with Laoui, the two of them flattened against the wall of the shack like a pair of comedians caught in a spotlight.

  Instead, an instant before the lights would have picked them out, the car came to a halt at the foot of the dock, the headlights trained on the one boat preparing to leave port.

  Three men got out of the car, leaving the motor running. Two wore the uniforms of the Guardia Civil, carbines hanging over their shoulders. From the back seat emerged a third man, dressed in a trench coat and a broad-brimmed fedora, his hands in his pockets. Their shadows bobbed in beams of the headlights as they walked toward the boat.

  The two shorter sailors stopped laying out the net and watched the men approaching. The sailors turned toward the man at the tiller, who shook his head, and they stopped their work with the nets. The man in the trench coat stopped near the bow and barked a few words in Spanish to the fishermen.

  The man at the tiller cupped a hand behind his ear and shook his head.

  The policeman switched to Arabic, the words shorter and of a different melody.

  The sailor said something in reply and gestured toward his crew and the boat and the open water beyond them. Laurent didn’t need a translator to understand that the skipper was asking why the police wanted to bother three innocent fishermen preparing for an honest day’s work.

  With an impatient wave of his arm, the man in the trench coat gave an order, and the two uniformed Guardia swung their carbines around until their muzzles pointed at the boat.

  For a long suspended moment none of the fishermen moved. Finally, the skipper, still protesting, climbed down onto the dock. His crewmen fell in behind him, following the two Guardia toward the car, the man in civilian clothes trailing behind. Before the last door banged shut, the car was making its way back toward the top of the bluff. Moments later it drove out of sight and all was as silent as before.

  When the car had disappeared, and with it his hope of leaving Tangier, Laurent turned on Laoui. “Someone must have tipped off the police. You were a damned fool to give them the money in advance.”

  The corners of the Moroccan’s mouth turned down. “You may be right,” he conceded equably. “On the other hand, who knows? This may have nothing to do with you at all. Fishermen along this coast have doubled as smugglers since Odysseus was in short pants. These men may have other sins to answer for.”

  “So, what do we do now?”

  Laoui looked at Laurent as if the Frenchman were a bit dense. “Unless you feel up to swimming to Portugal, I suggest we go back into town.”

  Frustrated, angry, tired, Laurent muttered unintelligibly a moment before asking, “Can we try again when they’re released?”

  “It might be some time before they are free again—unless they spend our money bribing the appropriate officials.”

  “Our money?” Already, Laurent was wondering how he would explain to Torrence that the money was gone and he was still in Tangier. “Merde.”

  They drove back in silence, Laurent’s mood seesawing between rage and gloom. Laoui appeared unperturbed.

  By the time they returned to Tangier, the city was coming awake, shutters rolling up, awnings rolling down, early risers heading for the cafes and the bread shops.

  Deflated and weary, Laurent drove to the square where Laoui had picked him up a couple of hours earlier. He parked at the curb and turned to get his suitcase from the back seat.

  “Wait.” It was the first word Laoui had said since they’d left the little port.

  Laurent heard the edge in his voice and turned around. A few yards away, on the other side of the square, a bored Guardia Civil leaned against a car with official plates, gazing down the narrow street toward Laurent’s hotel.

  Laoui raised his eyebrows. “It looks as though they may be looking for you already, my friend.”

  “How would they know where I was staying? And stop calling me your friend.”

  “They know everything.” Laoui nodded to Laurent. “Let us drive away. Slowly.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “As I mentioned before, if you need to stay a little longer than anticipated, I know a place where you will be welcome.”

  On the crest of the ridge that ran along the spine of Tangier, in a quartier of low orange trees and high stone walls, lay the estates of those who could afford to live at a remove from the center of town. They were mostly Europeans, though a few Moroccans had, through some oversight, infiltrated the privileged class of their own country.

  At Laoui’s direction, Laurent turned through an unattended gate flanked by painted tiles with florid lettering indicating they had come to the Villa Aeaea—five vowels in search of a consonant, Laurent mused.

  Something of the city’s seductive decadence clung to the flaking paint of the villa’s Moorish arches, into its broad unkempt lawns and unpruned rose bushes.

  “Park there.” Laoui indicated the villa’s broad front steps. “And please, my friend, be of good cheer.”

  “Stop calling me . . . Merde.”

  An awkward-looking boy in white trousers and a fez that did not fit him stepped from the shade of the arched e
ntrance and opened the car door for Laoui. The Moroccan got out of the car and said something to the boy, who turned and scuttled back toward the entrance to the villa. The money-changer dropped his head in exasperation and called again to the boy, who did another about-face and scrambled back down the steps, opened the car’s back door and pulled out Laurent’s suitcase. Gripping its handle with both hands, he proceeded to lug it toward the house.

  Before the boy had reached the top of the steps, a woman’s voice called from inside, the words indistinguishable, but the tone low and melodic.

  Laurent glanced at Laoui, but the Tangerois ignored him. When he looked again toward the house, the woman was standing at the top of the steps.

  She was tall, perhaps in her mid-thirties, with a deep tan and cascades of wavy black hair falling to her shoulders. She wore loose black slacks and a white blouse and stood barefoot in the sun, sporting a crooked smile on her lips that spoke of habitual skepticism and appealing wickedness.

  “Hello, Laoui,” she drawled, making his name sound like an epithet. “How’s the old crook?”

  He bowed his head as if he had never received a greater compliment. “At your service.”

  The woman folded her arms across her chest and cocked her chin toward Laurent, her faint smile turning, if possible, even more skeptical. “Who’s your friend?”

  Laoui, who had already jounced up to the top of the steps, whispered something into her ear. The smile on the woman’s lips changed into something unreadable. She replied quietly without taking her eyes off Laurent. The Moroccan shook his head. Finally, he stepped back and swept his arm in an extravagant bow. “But let me introduce you more formally. Madame Charlotte, this is Monsieur Rene Laurent.” He turned to Laurent, “Monsieur, this is Madame Charlotte, the owner of the Villa Aeaea.”

  Laurent made a slight, formal bow and said, “A pleasure to meet you, madam.”