Tangier: A Novel

by Stephen Holgate

  “Hmm. You think so?”

  Rene Laurent regarded the woman and hoped that, after sending his wife across the ocean, fleeing his country, finding himself unwelcomed by his own colleagues, and having missed his chance at escape, he had finally washed up on a friendly shore.

  Yet something in her face told him he might only be bobbing on dangerous waters of another kind.

  PART III

  FALL 1995

  TWELVE

  Felipe Sandoval, the Spanish diplomat, turned the photocopied document around on his desk so Chaffee could see it. Chaffee was surprised to see the document was handwritten.

  “You can read Spanish, Señor Chaffee? No? No matter.” The Spaniard’s manner had warmed since his last visit to the consulate. “Here, this short paragraph, dated October, 1940. Whoever wrote this report indicates that two security men assigned to follow Rene Laurent have been taken off that task, apparently at the request of a German intelligence official by the name of Wald.”

  Chaffee took out his reading glasses, a recent concession to age, and picked up the copy of the handwritten document. He imagined a harried security grunt scribbling his report in longhand because he wasn’t important enough to have a typewriter.

  “I don’t understand,” Chaffee said. “The two men following him were pulled off by the Germans? Why were the Spanish trailing him to begin with, and why would this German—Wald?—tell them to stop?” He pushed the paper back at Sandoval.

  The Spaniard waved at the document as if it were a difficult child. “I’ve asked myself the same questions, but I find no answers. Anything I add would be mere speculation.” He folded his hands in his lap and looked at Chaffee, clearly ready to speculate if given a little encouragement.

  “Please, feel free.”

  Sandoval picked up the document and cocked his head, as if looking at it from an odd angle was the key to understanding. “I assume your father was assigned to the consulate in Tangier.”

  “No. At least I don’t believe so. We had been told he was thrown in prison in Vichy and died there. That’s all we knew—or thought we knew. But he seems to have come here. And it appears he was on his way to Casablanca.”

  Sandoval shook his head. “But why?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m beginning to think the reason he didn’t come out of prison at the end of the war was that he had never been there.”

  The Spaniard spread his hands. “Then where is he, Señor Chaffee?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.” Struck by a new possibility, Chaffee asked, “Is it possible he was arrested and sent back to France after he wrote this?”

  “That would explain a great deal. But, if so, who arrested him? And, so many months after his arrival, why—or at least why then?” Sandoval put down the document and looked at Chaffee. “Can I ask how old your father was at the time?”

  “Thirty, thirty-one. Why?”

  “I am only saying there are other possibilities. I don’t wish to seem indelicate, but he was a young man, separated from his wife in a time of war. There are a number of reasons why he might have wanted to disappear from view—have gone underground, as I believe you say.”

  His implication was so near that of the French consul, Janvier, that Chaffee almost wondered if the two men had spoken to each other.

  “Anything is possible, I suppose,” Chaffee said with a tone meant to close that line of speculation. Still, the thought was not easily dismissed. Had it occurred to his mother that her husband, if he were still alive, might have passed the last fifty-five years with another woman? It would have been a young man’s temptation. And it made his father’s apparent failure to think of him, his still-unborn son, all the more logical—and all the more painful.

  A curious fact struck Chaffee—he was much older now than his father had been in the summer of 1940, and, if Rene Laurent had, after all, died during the war, he had now lived many more years than his father. In effect, he was older than his father, looking on the younger man’s life with the understanding of years. It was an unsettling thought, and he was glad when Sandoval interrupted it.

  “I’m sorry. I only mean to say that if your father is still alive, he must be quite old now.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You look disheartened, Señor Chaffee.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” he said, his tone harsher than he had intended. He took a breath and spoke more evenly. “I had hoped there would be more, that everything would get cleared up. Now I feel like I know less than I did before.” Chaffee folded his glasses and put them back in his pocket. “Is there any chance we can find anything more? There must have been some memo, a document indicating why he was being followed, reports from the men following him.”

  “You are correct, I’m sure, Señor Chaffee. But these documents no longer exist or are lost beyond retrieval.” Sandoval rocked back and forth in his swivel chair. “It is something of a miracle that we have found this. When I think of the similar miracle that brought your father’s letter to you, I have to say that you have already been fortunate beyond reason.”

  “Have I?” He registered Sandoval’s surprise. “My whole life I’ve taken comfort from the certainty that the father I never knew had died in prison for his commitment to a noble cause. Now I feel I know nothing, have never known anything.” Chaffee suddenly felt very old. “The old truths are gone, and I have nothing to replace them.” Was he speaking of his own fall from grace? Weary of examining himself, he didn’t want to know the answer.

  Sandoval smiled politely and said nothing. His interest in Chaffee’s case was clearly fading.

  Chaffee saw it and slapped his hand on the desk. “There must be some chance that the man who wrote this report might still be alive, might even be living in this area.”

  The Spaniard looked at the note once more, as if it might hold the secret for getting him out of this conversation. “It is signed F. Molina. A name as common as grass. Even if this man were still alive, there is no reason to think he would be living in this area.” With the tip of one finger, he pushed the document toward Chaffee. “Please, feel free to take it with you.”

  “But won’t you need to keep a copy?”

  “For what, Señor Chaffee?”

  The man behind the counter at the Post, Telegraph and Telephone office recognized Chaffee from his previous visit and handed the phone directory to him before the American got beyond “Bon jour.”

  After one more attempt to find R. Laurent, he searched for F. Molina and found several. He wrote down the numbers, took one of the available phone booths, and began calling. Some were, by their voices, clearly too young. One was a woman. The rest made clear, or as clear as they could to someone who spoke no Spanish and only a little French, that they had no idea what he was talking about.

  After half an hour of fruitless calls, Chaffee slumped on the phone booth’s tiny stool. He watched the other people in the office going about their business, paying bills, buying stamps, making phone calls to people they knew and who spoke their language. They belonged here, in this office, this city, this country. He did not. With the shocking pain of a sudden stab wound, he thought of his lost position, his vanished prestige, his missing father, as of a death suddenly remembered. Without them, he had no idea of who he was. His stomach clenched in anguish. In a city whose life went back thousands of years, he was a nonentity, a nobody trying to shine light on a single moment as important to him as it was inconsequential to anyone else.

  When he knew his spirits could sink no lower, a thought bubbled up from the recesses of his mind that made him tilt back his head and laugh so loudly that a couple of the good citizens passing by looked at him as if he had gone crazy. Christopher Chaffee smiled back, wanting to say to them, “No, I’ve only gone stupid.” But he knew they would not have understood what he was talking about.

  Chaffee had thought that his first trip to the Legation Museum would prove his last. Erickson knew who he was and both disapproved of a
nd disliked him. So he hesitated before knocking again on the big wooden door in the medina.

  This time Ali’s nod of recognition contained no warmth—Erickson must have related to the young Moroccan the litany of his sins.

  “Can I ask what this is about, Monsieur Chaffee?”

  From a corner of himself that he hadn’t used in a while, Chaffee dredged up a bit of his former imperiousness, like a middle-aged Superman trying to fit back into his suit. “Just get Erickson for me,” he said in a voice that brooked no disagreement, and felt gratified at how quickly the young man went in search of the museum director.

  It was a longish wait and when Erickson appeared he did not look happy.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Chaffee?” he asked in a tone that might have as easily been used for, “Allow me to hit you in the head with a baseball bat.”

  “When I was here last, you mentioned a former OSS officer who retired to Tangier. I would like you to introduce me to him.” Chaffee’s old peremptory manner was like a tonic.

  Erickson, himself a veteran bureaucrat, didn’t budge. “Though still in good health, the gentleman in question is quite old now. Older even than me”—he made the barest of smiles—“and I am reluctant to disturb him unnecessarily. He is also cautious these days about whom he sees. Can I ask why you wish to talk to him?”

  “That is a private matter. I wish to discuss it only with him.”

  Erickson shook his head. “I’m sorry Mr. Chaffee, but that’s not good enough.” The director of the museum squared his still formidable shoulders.

  Trying to keep his voice even, Chaffee said, “Then I will have to find him by other means.” He turned on his heel and headed for the door.

  As he reached for the door handle, he stopped. Whether Erickson knew it or not, the older man had called his bluff. He had no other means. He didn’t even know the name of the man he sought. Erickson was the only one who could help him.

  He had swallowed his pride so many times since coming to Morocco he was about to choke on it, but he knew he had no choice. His chest heaving with frustration he turned on Erickson, but when he opened his mouth he found he could not speak. With his heart on the verge of exploding and tears prickling his eyes, he managed to blurt out, “I am trying to find my father!”

  The two men glared at each other, each waiting for the other to break the silence. It was Erickson who gave in. “Wait here.”

  A few minutes later Ali reappeared, but rather than handing Chaffee a piece of paper with an address, he said, “Follow me,” and led him upstairs and through the double wooden doors of the director’s private quarters.

  A living room full of solid but faded furniture led to a narrow hallway and a small dining room. Here Ali stopped, his writ apparently extending no further, and gestured toward the open doorway at its opposite end. “Mr. Erickson is in the kitchen,” he said before retreating back toward his station at the front door.

  Unsure of what unspoken obligations he might be accepting by entering the director’s living quarters, Chaffee thought of following Ali back toward the street. Instead, he took a breath and walked through the open doorway.

  The warmth of the kitchen, the smell of breakfast and the steam rising from a boiling tea kettle evoked a sense of domesticity that disarmed Chaffee even as he tried to maintain his guard.

  Erickson sat at a wooden table in the center of the room, a spoon in his hand, poised before a woman of considerable years, sitting in a wheelchair. The slackness of her hands on the chair’s arms mirrored the slackness of her face, devoid of expression. A brace rising at the back of the chair cradled her head. Her eyes, though, were intelligent and alive, and shifted toward him as he stood in the door.

  “Yes, darling, I have a visitor,” Erickson said, his voice warm and low. The woman’s eyes shifted back to Erickson and she opened her mouth awkwardly as he fed her from a bowl of hot cereal.

  Resenting the forced intimacy, Chaffee was ready to apologize and back out of the room. He looked to Erickson, but the older man’s eyes checked him in place, imparting as clearly as any words: “Yes, I wanted you to see this.”

  So Chaffee stood in the doorway while Erickson continued to feed his wife, finishing the last bits of cereal, holding a glass of juice to her lips, murmuring encouragement, quietly telling her of the weather and what some friend had said in a letter. When the bowl was empty, he wiped her mouth, rose and gripped the handles of her wheelchair. As he turned her away from the table, the woman gave Chaffee a last glance, in which he thought he read a note of apology.

  Chaffee nodded to the boiling kettle. “Do you want me to. . . ?”

  “No. It helps keep the room moist. Good for her lungs,” he said and pushed his wife toward a hallway off the kitchen, telling her that he would be back soon but he had to talk to this man first. Chaffee could hear Erickson easing her from her chair, followed by the squeak of bedsprings. After a few moment’s absence, the museum director returned, again the formidable presence Chaffee met in his previous visits.

  “Sit down,” the director said.

  Chaffee remained standing, and Erickson did not insist.

  “Frances suffered a stroke two years ago. She survived.” Erickson retook his chair by the table. “She undergoes physical therapy every other day. Her therapist says she will continue to improve.” A flicker of his brown eyes spoke to his skepticism. “You’re married, Mr. Chaffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “Happily?”

  “I believe so.”

  Erickson squinted at the ambiguous reply, then let it go and nodded toward the hallway down which he had wheeled his wife. “One becomes angry at God when something like this happens. It lives in you, this anger, corrodes your outlook. At your worst you arrogate to yourself His prerogative of judging others.”

  Though not an apology, it was an offer of truce.

  “Please, Mr. Chaffee, sit down.”

  This time he did.

  “The man you wish to meet is Gordon Sands. As I said, he was with the OSS here during the war. You are thinking he may have known your father, by one name or another.”

  It took a moment for the implication to sink in. When it did, he bridled. “You’re suggesting my father might have been using an assumed name. Are you saying he might have been a spy?”

  “I’m not saying anything.” Erickson waved Chaffee back into his chair, though he had not actually left it. “Except that you have no idea what happened to him back then or, if he’s still alive, what has happened since. And neither have I. This is a difficult city to get hold of. The Tangerois even now remain, in their quiet way, a people that resist being governed. They are like a wayward and willful son, an embarrassment to the family. So the rest of Morocco looks the other way and doesn’t try to do too much with them. During the war, with its intrigue, its plots, its opportunities, Tangier was absolutely in its element. Everyone was here—the British, the Germans, Italians, French. The Americans. A strategically invaluable city at the mouth of the Mediterranean, and no one in charge.”

  “I thought the Spanish took over at the beginning of the war.”

  “Yes, they exerted some nominal authority. They’d controlled much of northern Morocco even before the war. Old Tangerois are still more likely to speak Spanish than French. The ties are close, if uncomfortable. And ancient. Many of the families here are descended from the last of the Moors, kicked out of Spain five hundred years ago. They left grudgingly and retreated only this far, where they can see their old homeland across the Straits. Some of them retain the iron key to their former houses on a hook by the door—though most of them were knocked down centuries ago. And they’re still madder than hell about it. Memories here are long, much longer than most Americans can imagine.”

  “So, why doesn’t anyone remember what happened to my father?”

  Erickson chuckled. “Who knows, perhaps someone does. Care for some tea?” Without waiting for an answer, Erickson poured two cups. “About the war . . . the na
tions killing each other on every battlefield in Europe were all represented here—their soldiers, their diplomats, their spies going to the same cocktail parties, eating at the same restaurants, drinking in the same bars, each one trying to tease out the secrets of the others. Just as Alaska lives off oil, or Hollywood off movie stars, Tangier lived off espionage and smuggling.”

  “Smuggling?”

  “The two go hand in hand. The pipeline for goods becomes the pipeline for information and fugitives. Every commodity had value here—cigarettes, gold, watches, currencies, even postage stamps. The Germans smuggled in francs from French Morocco. The British smuggled francs and German marks to grease wheels and pay off spies, or to turn a quick profit on exchange markets. Smuggled knowledge of what the other side might be thinking and doing was especially valued.” He paused over his tea. “Tangier is still a city of spies in its way, clouded identities, clandestine lives, people in hiding, though usually only hiding from family members or creditors now. Or hiding from themselves—the deepest kind of cover, the oldest kind of war.”

  “But you know how I might find this man, Sands?”

  Erickson refilled his cup and gazed into space for a while, his expression troubled. “Why is this so important to you? Surely—you’ll forgive me—but surely your father must have died by now. Or, if he’s still alive, he doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Did you know your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know what became of him.”

  Erickson’s eyes went hard, seeing where this was going. “Yes, certainly.

  “Then you know who you are, where you came from, in ways I never have. Maybe that’s it. That’s why.”

  Chaffee let his words hang in the air.

  The museum director put down his tea cup. “All right, fair enough,” he said and turned to open a drawer behind him. He took up a pen and a piece of paper and wrote something down. “I’ve phoned Sands. He has agreed to see you. This is his address in the old medina. It’s better if you visit him late at night. After eleven. Unlike most older people, that’s when he’s at his best. I only ask that you wait until tomorrow night. I need to let him know you’re coming.”