Tangier: A Novel

by Stephen Holgate

  “We think you might be of service right here.”

  Laurent waited.

  “You’re staying at the Villa Aeaea, yes?”

  Laurent didn’t bother to ask Harris how he knew.

  “Your hostess—or should I say your landlady?—is Charlotte Wald. Oh, don’t be offended. My colleagues and I are deeply curious people, that’s all. Frankly, we wonder who she is exactly and what she is doing up there in her villa at the top of the hill. We wonder too if you’d be willing to keep an eye on things there and from time to time tell us what you see.”

  “I don’t believe I understand.”

  “Really, Monsieur Laurent?”

  “All right, perhaps I do. I may be a number of things, not all of them admirable, but I’m not blind.”

  “No?”

  “I have worked long enough for the Foreign Ministry to know an intelligence agent when I see one.”

  His drink halfway to his mouth, Harris paused. “You see who I am because I want you to see it.”

  Laurent leaned back in his chair, trying to strike a casual pose. “Tell me, how is it you know who I am?” It came to him before Harris had a chance not to answer. “Laoui.”

  Harris bit his lip. “Ah. We’re not so clever as we thought.”

  “Yes. He’s the only person I know here.”

  “Other than the gentleman from the consulate who was sitting with you a moment ago.”

  And, like that, the virus of doubt burrowed into Laurent’s mind. Could it have been Harris that Torrence saw a few minutes earlier, impelling him to duck out quickly as he handed Laurent over to the British?

  Laurent’s feeling of uneasiness, and his respect for Harris’s craft both ticked up a notch.

  “No, Torrence is much too cautious to contact you,” Laurent said, trying to persuade himself he was right.

  “Well, there you are then.”

  The Englishman’s easy concession made Laurent all the more uncertain he had it right.

  “And if I helped you, you would undoubtedly make this worth my while.” Laurent put as much disdain into the sentence is as he thought it could hold.

  “You could use some money, yes?”

  “Not if you could help me get access to my bank accounts in France.”

  Harris smiled and returned to his persona as the friendly ally. “There are some things we can do rather easily and some we cannot do at all.”

  And, Laurent thought, some things you would not wish to do if they meant I no longer need you. “Listen,” he said, “maybe the first service I can do for you is to tell you that you’re laboring under an illusion. I can’t claim to know her well, and I’d never nominate her for sainthood, but Charlotte Wald is not one of the enemy. She despises them. While I was having a drink with her the other night, she launched into an anti-fascist diatribe that would put her into a barbed wire camp in Germany.”

  Harris leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Then this will be the easiest money you ever made. Ah, I’m sorry. I’ve offended you again. As I say, I know you wouldn’t do this just for the money.”

  “I see no reason to do it at all.”

  The man across the table said nothing, but reached into his coat pocket and handed Laurent a business card that read: “Michael Harris, International News Service,” and listed a post office box in Tangier. No phone number.

  “If Charlotte Wald is as much opposed to the Axis as you say,” Harris said, “you’ll likely have no reason to take this any further. On the other hand, if for some reason you find you want to contact me, simply drop a postcard to this address. List a number, one through seven. That will indicate the day of the week, with Sunday representing number one. I will meet you here at nine on the evening of the day you indicate.” With that, Harris rose, leaving his drink on the table, and drifted toward the bar, where he paid his bill and left.

  Laurent nursed his gin and tonic for some time, thinking over the Englishman’s offer, but came to no conclusion. Before he rose to leave, he caught himself looking once more around the room to see if anyone was watching him. He was becoming as nervous as Torrence.

  NINETEEN

  Furnace-like temperatures from the interior lapped at the edges of Tangier, and when the cooling winds off the water failed, the desert heat overwhelmed everything. The summer days passed slowly. Laurent stayed up late, drank more than his custom, and rose later each morning, plagued by a lassitude that left him flat and weary no matter how long he slept.

  After his botched escape on the fishing boat and his run-in with the man in his hotel room—to say nothing of the likelihood that the Consul General would have him arrested if he knew he was in the city—he seldom left the villa except for running occasional errands for Charlotte, all of them apparently quite innocent.

  Too often, he lay in his room much of the day, hatching plots of escape from Morocco, each one less plausible than the last. He thought of contacting Harris, claiming to have observed some event that put him at risk and insisting he be spirited away. But he told himself these were matters too serious to lie about—or at least to lie about clumsily—and in any case doubted Harris would believe him.

  Eventually the thinking, not the act, became its own end. The war became an abstraction. Even Marie-Therese took on the aspect of a dream only half remembered. On his worst days, he entertained the idea that, as Torrence had said, the war was over. He toyed with the notion as one might toy with a dose of narcotics, deciding whether to take it and slip into oblivion. In any case, even if he escaped to Portugal he would likely be interned, and that wouldn’t be much different than his current genteel form of house arrest.

  On a particularly hot afternoon, Laurent found just enough strength to push himself out of bed and down the stairs of his solitary wing toward the cooler rooms of the villa’s main floor.

  The house lay empty and silent but for the distant sound of Rabia in the kitchen and the sight of the boy, Mohammed, his services unneeded, curled up in a chair, asleep.

  Laurent wandered past the broad stairway leading to the second floor where Charlotte, and, he assumed, her boarders when they were present, had their rooms. Though nothing had been said, he understood this floor, the one that contained her bedroom, was forbidden to him.

  As he walked through the dining room he noticed a door he must have passed several times without remarking on it. Curious where it might lead, he tried the handle and found that it opened onto a steep staircase.

  Enjoying the thrill of trespass, he shut the door behind him and started up the stairs, its darkness broken by a small window halfway up its length. Opposite the window was a door he judged opened onto the second floor. He paused, feeling the temptation to open it, but he decided to continue.

  The stairs ended at a wooden door, warm to the touch. He pushed it open and found himself on the villa’s roof, its broad flat surface broken only by a scattering of chimney tops. An empty chaise longue and a small wooden table beside it made clear that it was not always deserted.

  After the villa’s dim interior, the painful brilliance of the white-painted roof made his eyes water. Shading them with one hand, Laurent walked to the edge of the roof, bounded by a waist-high parapet. From there he could look out over the surrounding palms and the rooftops of the neighboring villas toward the white city below and the distant blue of the Straits. He felt like an explorer discovering a new world.

  Despite the heat, the air was fresh, stirred by breezes off the Atlantic that he had not detected in the garden. Laurent sighed with pleasure and breathed deeply the clear air, his lethargy melting away in the refreshing breeze. Delighted with the view and its perspective on the city and the sea, he stayed until he had lost track of time, finally, reluctantly, going back down the stairs, pleased with his discovery and the prospect of coming back to it whenever he liked.

  Once he had discovered this rooftop refuge, he returned often, usually at night, when he could look out over the lights of Tangier and the blackness of the sea and br
eathe the cool evening air. Occasionally, he found the chaise lounge in a different position and sensed that Charlotte had been there.

  Laurent felt his spirit enlarged by the wide vistas. The sight of the boundless sky, open in every direction, made him feel less like a prisoner of war.

  Grateful for Charlotte’s occasional company, and, though he tried not to admit it, flattered by her attention, he had found that his evening drinks with her in the salon dissipated whatever recovery of spirit he had gained during the day. Stirred by her beauty, he also grew troubled, beguiled into too much drink, unwilling to rise in the morning. Something about her smile on those seductive, debilitating evenings told him that she understood her effect on him and was patiently cultivating it.

  Spurred by the unsettling crosscurrents of his growing attraction to Charlotte, his longing for his wife, even as she became more of an abstraction to him, and by his growing sense of isolation, Laurent did something he had not done since he visited Torrence at the Consulate the day after his arrival in Tangier; he wrote to his Marie-Therese.

  He found paper in the salon and scratched out a few lines, telling her he was still in Tangier but hoped to leave before long, adding that he missed her desperately, hoping he meant it as fervently as he claimed. Knowing other eyes might read it before she did, he gave no indication of where he was staying or what he was doing. He would have avoided any mention of being in Tangier if the postmark wouldn’t reveal it anyway.

  After he signed the letter and folded it into an envelope, he realized he had little idea where to send it. Was she in Washington? New York? For all he knew, she had returned to France. Finally, he addressed it to the French Embassy in Washington, hoping that someone there might know where she was, and, whatever his arguments with his own government, would be willing to forward mail to his wife.

  He gave the letter and money for a stamp to M’barak and asked him to post it when he went downtown. The Moroccan nodded and took the letter without looking at it.

  Sending the letter made him feel clean and renewed, like the feeling after taking communion. Over the next couple of weeks he sent her three more letters via M’barak and the local post.

  He pictured her in Washington, worried and alone. He imagined his letters as a lifeline he could throw to her, assuring her they would be reunited one day. In fact, though, he vaguely sensed that the lifeline he threw was to himself, to maintain the reality of his wife even while the war, his fate, and Marie-Therese herself seemed on the verge of fading into irreality.

  On a hot, breathless summer night, Laurent went up to the roof again, but this time found no cooling breeze. For a few minutes he leaned against the parapet and gazed out at the neighboring villas, and, beyond them, the lights of the city. Finding no relief from the heat, he had decided to go back downstairs, when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of light. He stopped and looked toward the Straits. In the midst of its deep blackness he saw a fireball climbing into the night sky. Through its rising flames he thought he saw the outlines of a dying ship, its back broken, already splitting in two. A moment later, a rumble like rolling thunder shook the night air.

  Within seconds the fireball reached its peak and began to recede, an orange glow spreading over the water from its burning fuel. No further sound from the ship reached him. From this distance it burned in silence. But Laurent felt in his soul the screams of the sailors dying in the burning waters, just as he could imagine the U-Boat that had sunk their ship skulking away through the shallow waters of the Straits.

  Laurent lay awake for a long time that night. Sometime after midnight he heard the wind come up and the patter of a summer shower, blown in from the Atlantic, washing the air clean.

  Sick of the villa’s gloom, Laurent rose late the next morning and walked outside into the sun. Like the house itself, the gardens, bounded by a high stone wall, had been allowed to drift into a state of decay, with spindly untended orange trees and roses left to grow wild, their neglected climbers hanging limply from an arbor.

  Not a breath of air cut the morning’s heat as he walked through the dying garden. Yet he saw the tops of the palms swaying in a westerly breeze, promising relief on the rooftop. In the same moment he saw again the burning ship and imagined the dying sailors. The images, though, were already fading with the morning sun, until he half-believed it had never happened.

  The air in the narrow staircase grew warmer as Laurent neared the top. When he pushed the door open he felt the last wisps of the evening’s breeze, like the fading notes of a distant parade. Taking a deep breath of the cooling air, Laurent walked to the edge of the roof, leaned against the waist-high parapet, and stretched his arms out to his sides, enjoying the feel of the wind drying the sweat from his body.

  “You look as if you’re about to flap your arms and fly to Spain.”

  Startled, Laurent turned to find that for the first time since he had started coming to the roof, he was not alone.

  Charlotte Wald lay stretched out on the cushions of the chaise longue smoking a cigarette, wearing nothing but a pair of dark glasses. She lay on a towel, but apparently did not judge Laurent’s presence sufficient reason to cover herself with it.

  Whatever her straitened circumstances, the mistress of the Villa Aeaea still had the flesh of a pampered woman—soft, smooth, finely curved—made for love, not work.

  “Shut the door behind you,” she purred, “I wouldn’t want to catch cold.”

  Her skin glistened under a thin gleam of sweat.

  Face turned toward the sun, she lay perfectly still. Behind her dark glasses, though, Laurent felt her eyes on him.

  “You come up here often,” she said.

  “That doesn’t sound like a question,” Laurent responded.

  “You think I can’t hear you walking around on the roof at night?”

  “I like the view.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” she said as she shifted her legs almost imperceptibly and gave him her crookedest smile.

  Impelled by an association he could not explain, Laurent glanced toward the Straits and thought again of the ship burning in the night. To draw his attention back to her, Charlotte drew a long drag from her cigarette, her chest expanding with her breath, and let it out with exquisite slowness, just as she had done in the salon that first afternoon. Without the djellaba, its effect was all the stronger. The bittersweet smell of kif floated on the air.

  She saw his reaction and a slow smile spread across her face. “There’s nothing like it for relaxing. The kif, I mean.” She took another long breath followed by a slow sigh. “So, tell me, Laurent, how do you like exile in the Villa Aeaea?”

  He groped for words. “You’ve been kind to let me stay.”

  “Your diplomatic manners never fail you, do they? But I get the sense you still wish to leave.”

  “I still desire to make my contribution to the fight.” The taste of the words on his mouth lacked their previous savor.

  “Ah, yes, joining the war. Making a sacrifice. You’re a noble man. Perhaps you could even get yourself killed.”

  “I have no desire to die.”

  “Desire.” Again that slow smile. “You’ve used that word twice just now. I hope I’m not disturbing you in any way.” She laughed at his annoyance. “Ah, am I making you angry? I apologize. It’s simply that I have my desires, too. No, not that. Or at least that wasn’t my immediate meaning.” she laughed. “Squalid as it might sound, I need money.” She tapped her delicious thigh with a painted fingernail. “I don’t mean to sound venal, but what is one to do?”

  If she was waiting for him to reply, she was disappointed.

  “My chivalrous Frenchman.” Charlotte wagged her head. “I’ve appreciated your willingness to be helpful—even going downtown for me, which I suspect is not without its risks for you. They’re only little errands, but I’m grateful.”

  “I’m pleased to be of assistance.”

  “But I fear that my labors will soon prove inadequate to s
atisfy your, um, desire to serve.”

  Laurent leaned against one of the chimneys that punctuated the roof. He saw her body tense. “Yes?”

  She smiled unpersuasively. “Nothing, only be careful, monsieur. That’s the lightning rod you’re leaning against. I wouldn’t want it to come down on you.”

  As he turned and looked at the iron pipe secured to the chimney, he remarked on a thin wire climbing its length. “What is this?”

  “I have a little radio. Despite being on a hilltop, that wire is the only way I can get decent reception. Ah, but you would have no way of knowing that, would you? In fact, you have no idea of what’s going on in the world at all.” She stirred almost imperceptibly on her lounge, just enough to captivate any man who saw it. “If I had an extra radio I might lend it to you, but I’m afraid, without the antenna, you would get nothing but static in your room.”

  “Then I turn to you as my sole source of news. Tell me what’s happening.”

  She inhaled her kif and languidly blew it out. “I only listen to music. Ah, please,” she waved her hand at him as he ran a finger lightly along the wire, “the antenna is attached just so. Señor Rivera tells me I must not touch it. He’s the one who strung it up. He’s such a clever man.”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  She tilted her head at a sly angle. “That’s not a note of jealousy I hear in your voice, is it? You needn’t worry. He and Snoussi go on their business trips. They putter around the house a bit mysteriously. But I barely know them.” She drew a hand slowly across her breasts. “Ah, I fear I’m starting to burn. Could you put a little oil on me?”

  Her brazenness threw him off center.

  “How charming,” she smirked. “You’re shy.”

  “You’re a beautiful woman and I’m a married man.”

  She put her tongue between her teeth and laughed softly. “It’s all right. I’m not the jealous type.”

  She flicked some ash onto the roof and held her cigarette out to him. “Try a little. Maybe it’ll take a bit of the starch out of your shirt.”