“Draper . . . Pete, listen, I’d like to take you up on that trip to Asilah. I need to get away from this place for a while.”
He half-expected Draper to give him the cold shoulder, knew he deserved it. Instead, the pianist smiled. The ways of good people were still a puzzle to him.
“Sure,” Draper said. “I’ll put my toop on and meet you down in the lobby at five-thirty. There’s a train at six.”
“Train?”
He waved his arm as if displaying the treasures adorning his room. “You don’t think anyone around here pays me enough to buy a car, do you?”
FIFTEEN
It was dark by the time they pulled into Asilah. The two Americans descended from the train and walked along the dimly lighted streets toward the beachfront. The town looked not unlike Tangier’s old medina, but brighter, more spacious, washed clean by the breezes off the Atlantic.
Asilah catered to tourists and the arty set, both Moroccan and European, with galleries and upscale restaurants sprinkled among the mostly single-story buildings that reminded Chaffee of villages he had seen in Mexico. From somewhere in front of him, he heard the crash of waves on the beach.
La Crepuscule was a modest establishment, with a dozen tables scattered around a low-ceilinged dining room. Large windows opened onto the beach, and a few couples sat gazing out to sea, talking quietly.
Chaffee followed Draper through an arched doorway into the bar, a close and windowless room lighted by candles flickering on dark wooden tables.
An ancient woman sat at a table near the end of the bar, absently waving an ebony cigarette holder. She tilted her head back and exhaled a long plume of smoke at a caged parrot suspended above her. The bird hopped uneasily on its perch, bobbed its head and cried, “Walloo! Walloo!” then stopped and added one more splat of guano to the accumulation at the bottom of his cage. Despite the heat from the small fireplace next to her, the old woman pulled her scarf closer around her crepey neck and took a sip from a glass filled with a strange-looking, bright yellow liquid.
The two Americans took seats at the other end of the bar.
“So, she’s the one you were telling me about?” Chaffee asked, nodding in the old woman’s direction.
“Yeah. The owner. Madame Dubois.”
“Madame Dubois? Sounds like the bawd in a Bourbon Street bordello. What’s her first name?”
Draper considered the question. “Beats the hell out of me. Maybe she hasn’t got one.” He laughed goofily. “They say she’s been here forever. Even the guidebooks mention her. Owned the place more than fifty years, since the late thirties. ‘Last bit of jetsam left from the high tide of French colonialism.’ That’s what one of them says.”
“Sounds a little poetic to me,” Chaffee said, making clear this was not a compliment.
“The locals claim she’s immortal.”
Chaffee eyed her again and sipped at his bourbon. “Not much of a favor, I’d say.”
Her eyes closed as if dreaming, the woman drew languidly on her cigarette and exhaled slowly.
Chaffee snorted. “She’s a phony. It’s all a pose. I can feel it.”
Draper glanced at the old woman, then quickly away, as if her gaze might turn him to stone. “I dunno. If she’s been phony this long, it’s real.”
Chaffee chuckled.
The old French woman looked in their direction and blew another lungful of smoke into the already-cloudy air. This was apparently the parrot’s cue and he again cried:, “Walloo! Walloo!”
Chaffee made a face. “‘Walloo?’ What’s that mean?”
“Berber word. Means, like, zero. No got. Empty. Nothing. Zilch.”
Chaffee grunted. “That’s one hell of a philosophical parrot she’s got.”
Draper nodded in the woman’s direction. “Want to meet her?”
Chaffee shrugged equivocally.
Puzzled, Draper asked, “That’s why you came, isn’t it?”
Chaffee didn’t want to explain—because he didn’t understand it himself—that she was suddenly the last person in the world he wanted to talk to. A strong whiff of malignancy clung to her, a warning that he should stay away. But he allowed Draper to grip him by the arm and lead him down the bar to where she sat.
The old woman’s eyes shifted wearily in their direction as they approached. “Draper, early as always. You’re such a good boy,” she drawled, her voice thick and slow and dreamy with a detachment Chaffee thought strange, until he caught a whiff of the smoke swirling round her head and recognized the smell of cannabis, which the locals mixed with tobacco and called kif.
She gazed at Chaffee a long time before giving Draper a sidelong glance. “So, who’s your friend?”
“Madame Dubois, this is Chris. From the United States. Like me.” He spoke loudly and slowly and Chaffee gathered she couldn’t hear well.
The old woman’s eyes remained on Chaffee until she sensed his irritation. It seemed to please her and she nodded the two Americans into chairs near her table. “Welcome to la Crepuscule, Monsieur . . . ”
“Chaffee.”
Madame Dubois raised her eyebrows as if he’d given her a false name. She allowed him a moment to change his story before giving him a have-it-your-way shrug. “Chaffee,” she repeated then turned to her pianist. “Well, Draper, are you going to play for me tonight?” She spoke English with exquisite slowness and a thick French accent.
“Sure. What should I play?”
The effort of smiling appeared to tire her and she gave it up. She waved her cigarette holder and looked at the ceiling. “Whatever you like. You play ‘The Girl From Ipanema?’ Yes? Well, for godssake don’t play it here.” She took a sip from her strange drink and looked at Chaffee. “This will be the only bar in the world where the pianist never plays ‘The Girl From Ipanema.’”
Suddenly her shoulders began to shake and her breath came in broken spasms. It took Chaffee a moment to realize she was laughing.
“No, baby.” She patted Draper on the hand. “Play something of your own tonight.”
Draper smiled and nodded. “Sure thing.” As he had done when standing in his doorway at the hotel, the American patted the top of his head and assured himself his toupee was in place before walking across the room to a highly polished upright that gave off a surprisingly rich tone as he launched into “The Lady is a Tramp.”
The ancient woman smiled. “He’s a good boy,” she said, then narrowed her eyes. “What brings you to Morocco, Monsieur . . .”
“Chaffee.”
Again she gave him that look and rolled the word around her mouth as if it had an odd taste. “Chaffee.”
“Family business.” He sensed that she was the sort you didn’t lie to—nor tell the whole truth.
“Mmmm. Fa-mi-ly biz-ness.” She drew out each syllable. “You’ll be staying a long time.” It wasn’t a question.
“No. Just a few days.”
“Ah. You have conducted your business successfully.”
Chaffee wondered by what sorcery she made him feel that she had the right to an answer. “Not quite yet,” he offered grudgingly.
She chuckled, a sort of cackling moan that made Chaffee’s hair stand on end. “And you are a friend of Draper’s.”
Rather than asking questions, she had a way of making statements, as if she already knew the truth.
“Barely know him. We’re staying at the same hotel in Tangier.”
She rolled her eyes as if Tangier were a joke Chaffee didn’t quite get.
Whatever her act was, it was beginning to get on his nerves.
“And he invited you down here, thinking you’d be amused to meet the mad Frenchwoman who runs the place.” When he frowned and didn’t reply, she waggled her head. “Now I’ve upset you.”
“I’m not upset,” he said, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of being right. He lifted his glass and found it empty. The old woman caught the barman’s attention with a raised eyebrow and nodded at Chaffee’s glass. The American sig
naled “when” with a raised finger and grunted his thanks. “I’m told you’ve had this place forever.”
“Forever,” she repeated, like a prisoner contemplating an unexpectedly harsh sentence. “Everyone thinks I was born old and immediately became the owner of this bar.” The idea evidently held its ambiguous pleasures.
It occurred to Chaffee that he might be happy enough to let it stop right here. Something about the woman gave him the sort of shiver down the back that the ancients must have felt when consulting an oracle. Hell, he thought, the old bat was probably the oracle’s grandmother.
Despite his misgivings, he plunged in. “I came here to talk to you.”
The old woman was watching Draper, but Chaffee saw her eyes widen.
“Ah.”
“I’m looking for someone.”
Without moving, she shifted her eyes to Chaffee then back to Draper. Almost imperceptibly she waggled her head, a gesture so equivocal that Chaffee wasn’t sure if it was an invitation to continue, or an order to shut up.
He turned in his chair and leaned into her. The bittersweet smell of marijuana mixed with tobacco burnt his nose.
“I’m looking for someone from the war.”
Still, she wouldn’t look at him. “Which one? There’s always a war.” The wisp of a smile floated across her lips.
“From 1940.”
“Ah, that war.” She paused, thinking something over. “So, who is this man you’re looking for?”
“His name was Drake. He was with British intelligence.”
Something in her eyes, a barely perceptible dilation, made him think she knew the name. It proved, though, only the prelude to a hollow laugh. “A spy. And you think I must have known him because I’ve been around since before they started measuring time and I’ve met everyone.”
Chaffee clenched his fists, sensed she wanted him to lose his temper. “Something like that.”
She looked away and fell silent until Chaffee thought she was refusing to say more. But something, pushed by the kif, seemed to be racing around in her head.
“Drake.” She blew out a ragged breath. “I wonder. People saw spies under their beds back then. Everyone fancied himself a spy.” She turned her basilisk gaze on him, and smiled when he could not meet her eyes. “Tell me, what is a spy? Someone who keeps secrets? Are you a spy? What are you keeping from me? What are you holding back?” When he didn’t reply, she chuckled. “God knows I must be a spy. I have so many secrets.” She took a puff from her cigarette and turned her head in a slow circle as she released it, wreathing her head in smoke. “But all my secrets are about dead people. Long dead. What’s the use in having secrets if no one cares about them anymore?”
“I’m not after secrets. I just want to know if you knew a man named Drake during the war.”
Madame Dubois looked at Chaffee as if he had only now sat down next to her. “Ah, yes.” It seemed to be coming back to her. “You’re looking for someone. Believe me, he’s dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
She returned to watching Draper, making clear that, as far as she was concerned, their conversation was over.
“Everyone I knew.”
Chaffee could no longer smell the kif and knew that he had been breathing it with her and would soon be sharing whatever dream possessed her. Then he would know everything.
He recognized the seductive loopiness of his thinking and pulled back from the scent of her smoke.
“I believe Drake is still alive,” he said. “He was a British agent here. He left before the war was over, but I have reason to think he has returned.”
Dubois sighed wearily. “Where was he, this Drake?”
“Tangier.”
She shook her head. “I spent the war in Marrakech. There was no one there named Drake.” She brightened momentarily, as if a charge of electricity had passed through her. “I saw Roosevelt there once. In Marrakech. During the war. He was a cripple. They tried to hide it from everyone. But they couldn’t hide it from me.”
Her dilated eyes were black and bottomless.
“I thought you owned this bar even back then. People must have come here from Tangier.”
She shook her head. “That’s just a story. People want to make a story out of everyone. A scary story. A funny story. A spy story. None of it is true. No. I bought this place after the war. I stayed while everyone else left. The Spanish are gone. The French are gone. The British. The Germans. Gone.” She thought this over for a while, moving her mouth, as if chewing on the gristle of their absence. “One little European girl left. And I’ll soon be gone, too. All gone.” She rolled her eyes. “Well, not all. Not everyone. The Moroccans will still be here. They take care of themselves now—and rather well. That hurts the amour-propre of the Europeans. They told themselves that the wogs couldn’t get along without them. In fact, they—the Europeans—were just a stage, another wave washing over the place before receding.” She took another puff of her cigarette, tilted back her head and blew the smoke toward the parrot, who responded with his bleak chorus. “Walloo! Walloo!”
Madame Dubois shook her head. “My memory is full of holes. What you’re asking about—those times—all gone. And just as well. They weren’t that great the first time around.”
“But I need to find this man, Drake.”
“Yes. For your fa-mi-ly biz-ness.” She turned her dreamy eyes on him. “Give it up. Go home.”
She blinked slowly and turned away, deep in the spell of her cannabis. Who knew what she meant by anything she said?
Chaffee did give it up, for now, and turned in his chair to listen to Draper.
After uncounted hours in piano bars around the States, Chaffee thought he knew the whole tired repertoire, but he was sure he’d never heard the piece Draper was playing, a minor-key melody that suited the place, one in which the pianist found endless variations, each a little more elegant and sad than the last. It spoke to a depth of soul Chaffee wouldn’t have imagined in a man like Draper. Had he always underestimated everyone but himself? The possibility—and the wisps of cannabis floating around in his brain—made him groan out loud.
The old woman gazed at him. “I asked him to play one of his own. He can play that one for an hour. He’s a marvel.” She looked around the bar at her clientele and sighed. “They never notice.”
She fell silent, content to smoke and listen to Draper.
“Say, you’re Christopher Chaffee, aren’t you?”
Chaffee looked up to find a beefy fortyish guy in need of a haircut smiling down at him. On his arm was a thin worried-looking woman Chaffee took to be the man’s wife.
He eyed the man coldly then turned away. “Me? No.”
“Sure you are. I read all the papers. I saw your picture in the Topeka Capital-Journal.”
Chaffee hung his head in disbelief. “The Topeka . . . Jesus.”
The woman pulled at her husband’s arm. “Honey, he says he’s not—”
“Sure he is. Hey, those bastards gave you a raw deal. But you didn’t have to run this far to get away from them.” The man laughed at his own joke.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Hey, come on. No need to be bashful.” The man turned to his wife. “Honey, this is Christopher Chaffee. Big shot in Washington. He’s the one the papers screwed over.” Apparently feeling some bond had been sealed between them, the man turned back to Chaffee and said confidentially, “We think very highly of you. We both voted for you.”
“You don’t vote for agency directors, you horse’s—” Like a hypnosis subject cued to react to a secret word, the mention of Washington had once more made him the man he’d been there. “I never ran for office in my life.”
“Tony,” his wife pleaded.
“Hey, fella, there’s no need to get hot about it. I’m just saying—”
“You said it. Now beat it.”
Chaffee half-expected the guy to take a swing at him and was half looking forward to it. But the ma
n only glared at him and turned to his wife. “Sonofabitch. Shoulda strung him up from a lamp post like Mussolini.”
The man let his wife lead him off to a table on the other side of the room from which they eyed him and whispered to each other.
Chaffee heard the old woman’s breathing again break into shuddering gasps and knew she was laughing at him. “Welcome, Monsieur Chaffee, to the place where your past comes up to bite you in the ass.”
“Morocco or just la Crepuscule?”
Madame Dubois smiled faintly and shrugged.
Chaffee was in no mood for the old woman’s irony anymore than he was interested in having the American couple gawk at him the rest of the evening. While Draper played with his eyes closed, his head nodding slowly, possessed as much by his own dream as Madame Dubois was by hers, Chaffee rose from his chair and headed for the door.
“Tell Draper I had to go.”
SIXTEEN
As far as Chaffee could make out, the sign in the darkened ticket window at Asilah’s deserted trains station said he could pay his fare once on board, but it gave no hint of when the next train might arrive.
So he sat on the edge of the platform, his tired legs dangling from his aching butt, and looked down the tracks in the direction of Rabat then north toward Tangier. In either direction, the darkness quickly swallowed the glint of the moonlit rails.
For a while he looked up at the stars and listened to the distant sound of the waves, using their cadence to measure his ambivalence about his ruined career, his journey to find his father, even about his name—Chaffee or Laurent?—all the time nursing the resentment of being forced to face these questions at an age when he should be fat and comfortable and at his ease, weaving together the many strands of a successful life, rather than watching them unravel like a cheap rug.
His view of the sluggish, seductive water of the port that morning came back to him with all its dread and all its promise. Like a physical blow—a fist out of the darkness—he understood how much he resented his father, had resented him his entire life, even while telling himself, or being told by others, that he idolized him. His reverence for the image in the photo had only masked a rage at the man he’d never known, rage for putting his career before his family, for putting his love of country ahead of his love for him, his son. For deserting him. Caught in that long-ago instant by some Parisian photographer, his father had remained unchanging, perfect, instead of the sort of dim, hopelessly passé dad his friends all had the luxury of disdaining and transcending. Yes, he resented the hell out of him, first for dying, and now for the possibility of being alive. And if he himself had been a miserable sonofabitch, it was because the man who deserted him had, all his life, been thrown up to him as a saint. Saints ended up helpless, going to prison, and dying young. He had decided long ago that he’d be damned if he’d let that happen to him.
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