While a student in Paris, Laurent had shared a few puffs of marijuana with his friends at jazz clubs in Montparnasse. It had done him no harm. He told himself that this wouldn’t either. Besides, if a beautiful woman lying naked before you asks you to take a puff from her cigarette, you do it.
He crossed to the chaise longue and sat beside her. Without seeming to move, she leaned her bare leg against his back as he took a drag.
“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” She laughed. “Since you’ve seen your wife, I mean.” She made a slow, sinuous shrug. “One of the hazards of war, no?”
“I suppose so.”
“It’s all right, Laurent,” she said. “Really.”
Was she talking about his longing for his wife or his growing desire for his hostess? Laurent didn’t know and was getting beyond the point of caring.
She offered the kif to him once more and he took another lungful.
She stirred in delectable discomfort. “Really, the heat has become too much.” She rose shamelessly from the chaise longue, towel in hand. “It’s time to go inside.” She flicked him a glance, her eyes half-closed. “Come with me.”
Charlotte Wald padded like a leopard across the roof, paused in the doorway and looked at him over her shoulder. “Really, it’s an innocent request.”
“There’s nothing innocent about you,” he said, even as he followed her down the long stairway. At the door leading out to the second floor she paused and regarded Laurent. She lifted her brow with a question they both knew had already been answered.
After the heat of the rooftop the broad corridor felt cool. Its flaking paint and unpolished floors reflected the same resigned decadence as the rest of the house. Walking slowly before him, Charlotte led Laurent through a broad doorway.
In the silent privacy of her room, Charlotte’s nakedness seemed more natural, and more provocative. An invitation he could no longer politely decline. A shaft of light through a gap in the curtains turned her deeply tanned body the color of honey.
“Isn’t it chilly in here after the heat?” she asked, her eyes holding his.
He took her in his arms, feeling the thin layer of oil on her skin, warm as the sun. He swept her up and laid her on the bed.
“Aren’t you kind,” she whispered, “to keep me warm.”
Laurent didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until she woke him with a fingernail drawn languidly across his chest. He opened one eye and found her staring at him as if he were a curious specimen of fauna she had come across.
“Hello, sleepyhead,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”
“I might still be dreaming.”
She leaned her head against his. “Let’s go for a drive.”
M’barak brought the car around to the front of the house and folded back its canvas top.
“I’ll drive,” Charlotte said and hopped behind the wheel of the big convertible, a camera slung over her shoulder.
The car’s sleek curves and creamy skin seemed somehow an extension of its owner and it spoke with the same sultry purr.
Charlotte Wald clearly enjoyed driving fast. Roaring through the streets of her quiet neighborhood, she first headed south, away from town, then west along a gravel road toward the Atlantic beaches, the big car motoring smoothly, open to the sky. The late afternoon sun threw the shadows of the trees in broad stripes across the road.
They said little, the new and fragile intimacy between them making conversation both unnecessary and perilous. After perhaps thirty minutes they came to a rocky point jutting into the Atlantic. Charlotte pulled over to the side of the road. “Come with me,” she said, and got out of the car.
He followed her down a path to an opening in the face of the rocky outcropping. The cave was narrow at first, but had been quarried out to form a low, broad gallery. On the far side, a ragged fissure split the end of the cave from top to bottom, opening it to the sky and the ocean. The waves of the incoming tide cascaded through the breach.
“The Grotto of Hercules,” Charlotte said. “It’s said he slept here after digging the Straits of Gibraltar.” She toed the rocky floor of the cave. “He must have been sleepy indeed.” She nodded toward the gap in the rocks. “The ancients considered this the end of the earth. Beyond it there was nothing but Oceanus, the realm of Poseidon and Neptune. Back when there were giants in the earth. Of course, Hercules wasn’t the last one here. Phoenicians, Romans, the Arabs, the French, British, Portuguese, Spanish.”
“But not the Swiss,” Laurent said.
She snorted. “No. We stayed at home and made cuckoo clocks.” Charlotte crossed her arms over her chest and took a few steps toward the fissure and the ocean beyond. “It’s like this tide. All these waves of invasion wash over Morocco and then recede.”
“It seems the Arabs have made a pretty good run. More than a thousand years.”
“Yes, and very cleverly, too, ducking their heads and letting the following waves crash over them and move on.”
The setting sun had reached the top of the breach in the rock, sending a shaft of light along the inrushing waters.
Laurent picked up a stone and threw it clattering off the rocky walls and into the water. “So, Morocco—Tangier—will live out its history like this cave? One wave after another crashing over it until time washes it away?”
Charlotte flicked him a glance and drew her arms more tightly around herself. He thought she wasn’t going to reply, but when she started to speak it came in a rush, as if expressing a thought she had held back as long as she could. “Maybe one day someone with the strength, the vision, will break all of these patterns, crash through the prison of history and make a new world.”
The passion in her voice startled Laurent. “You have very strong opinions for a voluptuary.”
Charlotte cocked her head as if ready to say more, but stopped herself.
Pensive, her head down—did she think she had said too much, or too little?—she walked slowly away from him and crossed to the other side of the gallery. For some time she watched the waves crashing through the narrow gap at the end of the cave before abruptly turning away. “Let’s go back. I’m weary of this place.”
Once outside, her mood lifted and she took up her camera. “Stop. There,” she ordered Laurent. “I want to take your picture.”
“Must you?”
“I must.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets. She snapped a couple of pictures at a distance, then came closer to take two more.
“That’s enough,” he said, annoyed at her inspection. “Let’s get out of here.”
They got into the car and she turned the convertible back toward Tangier. They both knew they were returning to her bed.
TWENTY
From his rooftop aerie Laurent saw the Citroen come through the gates of the villa and drive up to the front doors. Two men in suits emerged from the car, one of them tall and solidly built, with black, curly hair, thinning on top. The other was short, thin, of darker complexion, with something coiled and self-contained in his movements.
M’barak opened the trunk and retrieved two large suitcases, which he carried inside the house, brushing Mohammed aside when the boy belatedly scampered out.
Standing unobserved on the roof, Laurent needed no introduction. Monsieur Snoussi and Señor Rivera had returned from their travels.
Lighted candles and flowing conversation brought the dining room to life that night. The party consisted of only the four of them, each of their personalities adding its own light or darkness to the evening.
Rivera, the short, dark Spaniard, radiated a tense silence, constantly scrutinizing the others from under his heavy brow, his eyes darting like a lizard’s tongue from their mouths to their eyes to their hands, seeming to watch for some small gesture or glance that would betray a hidden intent.
By contrast, the taller, solidly built Snoussi was an expansive man of large gestures and considerable charm. Throughout dinner he happily recounted tales of their recent tra
vels.
After figs and harira soup and a main course of chicken tagine, the conversation flagged while they waited for fruit and coffee.
As if he had been waiting for this opening, Rivera dabbed his napkin to his mouth. “Tell, me, Monsieur Laurent, what are your views on the current course of the war?”
“Oh, Silvio,” Charlotte sighed, “don’t be a bore. What do you expect him to say?”
The corners of the Spaniard’s mouth turned down, but he did not retreat. “It seems to me that Herr Hitler has managed things rather well. He has swallowed Western Europe from the Arctic to Bordeaux, carved up Poland and forced the Russians to promise peace. His fascist allies have consolidated their hold on Portugal and Italy—”
“Not to mention much of your own country,” Charlotte added.
Rivera bowed his head. “Precisely. And as for the British,” he continued, “they have no army left, their air force is crumbling under the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign, and Mussolini’s forces in Libya have launched an offensive on Egypt. They could be at Suez in a few weeks.”
“Fascists, Mussolini . . . ” Charlotte Wald let the words drip from her mouth. “The Italians will melt as soon as their wounded start crying, “Mama mia!”
Laurent watched Snoussi and Rivera share a dark look. He knew Charlotte must have seen it too, though she gave no sign. Did they find her anti-fascist comments offensive, he wondered, or simply indiscreet?
Snoussi picked up the dropped ball of the conversation with the tale of an old man on a donkey cart who had caused an enormous traffic jam north of Rabat during their travels. Even Rivera forced himself to laugh and the mood around the table lifted. The Moroccan grinned with pleasure and segued into a story of a wedding festival in the mountains south of Fez.
They were amusing tales, Laurent thought. Tales that described everything but the nature of their business.
The conversation moved on, and began to leave Laurent behind. Though the others occasionally glanced his way, their table talk grew increasingly elliptical, with much suppressed laughter and raising of eyebrows, indicating a rich vein of communication that seemed to the Frenchman like a foreign language made of familiar words, but their meaning lost to him. Even the silences seemed a continuation of the same conversation, held at a pitch beyond the range of his hearing. While the others grew increasingly animated, Laurent excused himself and went up to his room. None of them asked him to stay.
Lying in his own bed that night—with the return of the two boarders, Laurent understood he would no longer be sharing his nights with Charlotte Wald—he felt a creeping sense of shame about his actions, which, if taken by someone else, he would have considered unspeakably shabby. Still, he told himself, Marie-Therese would never be hurt by his infidelity—only an indiscretion, really—because she would never know.
Yet he could not sleep.
When he tried, the faces of Charlotte, Snoussi, and Rivera emerged through the clouds in his mind like images from a magic lantern, and the evening’s dinner conversation replayed itself time and again, each time revealing new meanings, like a fugue in which each variation took on increasingly sinister undertones. His only certainty was that, behind their façade of ersatz charm and false bonhomie, something unholy clung to Charlotte’s boarders. And, for all her cynical knowingness, Charlotte apparently possessed a naïveté that prevented her from seeing the malevolent nature of her guests. Turning restlessly in his bed, Laurent wondered why he felt more concerned for her than for himself.
The clock by his bed read two when he decided to go up to the roof, where the breezes off the ocean might clear his mind and soothe his spirits. It took little self-awareness to admit to the fantasy that, once on the roof, he might run into Charlotte, perhaps equally troubled. She would invite him back to her bed to calm her troubled soul. Or, if she were nowhere in sight when he got to the roof, he might find the nerve to descend to the cool and silent corridor leading to her room.
Laurent padded out of his room and down the narrow stairs to the corridor leading from his room. He had reached the last step when, through the darkness, he sensed more than saw a form in the foyer at the end of the hall, an image so obscure he thought at first it might be nothing more than a continuation of a dream from which he hadn’t entirely awakened.
But the form, however vague, was real enough. It appeared to be not one person but two, wrapped in an embrace so consuming they had no idea they were not alone. Unsure of the significance of this tableau—except that it was meant to be seen by no one—Laurent shrunk into the frame of one of the doors along the corridor.
His eyes straining in the darkness, he detected only the barest of movements, a subtle swaying like the shimmering of a mirage from which emerged a murmur of voices—first a man’s, low and intimate, then a woman’s in reply, husky, with a trace of irony. Charlotte’s voice.
Waving away the distracting needle of jealousy, Laurent realized that it was not, as he had at first thought, the “clever” Snoussi before him, wrapped in Charlotte’s arms, but someone he had never seen before. Though he focused every nerve on the sound of their voices, Laurent could catch nothing of what they said, nor even what language they spoke, though he felt certain it was not French.
He had no sooner absorbed this thought than the couple broke their embrace. Charlotte took a step toward the interior of the house, drawing the tall, slim man by the hand. He hesitated an instant, then followed, leaving the corridor once again empty and silent.
Like a masochist trying to prolong his pain, Laurent thought of following them. But he did not need to trail behind them to know that Charlotte was taking the man up to her room.
Any thought of going up on the roof vanished with the silent pair. Instead, Laurent returned to his room, sank once more into his narrow bed, and, in the renewed darkness, was assailed by a villainous mélange of jealousy and guilt—the guilt caused not only by breaking his marriage vows, but by retreating from a world at war, and from the commitments he had promised to keep.
TWENTY-ONE
Laurent woke late the next morning, dressed, and wandered downstairs through the empty corridor.
Whatever the significance of the masque Laurent had witnessed the previous night—he was paradoxically determined to drive it from his mind and to learn its meaning—Rivera’s discussion of the war earlier that evening had brought home to him how little he knew of what was going on outside the walls of the Villa Aeaea.
Though he had once prepared himself for the day by reading several newspapers before breakfast, listening to the morning news broadcasts, and looking over the previous night’s diplomatic cables, he now saw or heard almost nothing of the world except for the occasional copy of one of the local French newspapers left lying round the house. These were either heavily censored, or their editors did not wish to disturb their readers with reminders of the world beyond Tangier. He had known nothing of the air battles being fought over Britain or of the Italian offensive in Egypt.
At some level he had enjoyed the sense of letting go, of no longer burdening—or flattering—himself with the illusion that he was responsible for what happened in the news. But now he felt the impulse to re-engage, to return to the world from which he had once taken his meaning.
After counting out his remaining fund of francs, pesetas and sterling, he asked M’barak to drive him into Tangier to buy some newspapers. He didn’t like to go back to the area near the Hotel Moulay Idriss, but it was the only part of town he knew well enough to find what he sought.
While M’barak waited in the familiar square, Laurent walked down to the road along the sea front toward a smoke shop that sold foreign newspapers. Here, near the port, the sun shone strongly enough to make him squint, and the wind off the water cooled the hot summer air. As he neared the tobacconist’s, he saw, on the opposite side of the boulevard, a small crowd gathered at the seawall, looking at something in the water. Curious, Laurent crossed the street.
As he approached, the faces o
f the Moroccans turned toward him, their usual affability replaced with something troubled and accusatory. He pushed his way through as they resentfully made way.
Below him, the Mediterranean lapped listlessly against the base of the seawall, barely jostling the body of the young man floating in the water. Stirred by a sluggish wave, the body nudged the base of the wall, arms held tightly in front of him, perhaps from gripping a rope he had hoped would save him. It made him look as if he had let go of his life only after a hard fight and he had not yet got over the shock of his own death. He floated face down except when he hit the wall and momentarily rolled up, revealing clear and fine features, terribly pale against his dark British sailor’s uniform. Could he have been a crewman on the ship he’d seen sending its fireball into the night sky? Laurent decided that it had been too long ago. No, the boy was simply an anonymous casualty of the war.
Laurent saw the other men looking at him. “Well, I didn’t do this,” he snapped. Yet he knew that in their eyes he was from one of the European nations at war, one of those who had brought this young boy’s body from his home in a faraway country to darken their city. Muttering to them and to himself, Laurent crossed back to the other side of the boulevard, and, trying to put the image of the boy out of his mind, continued on his way to the news shop.
He purchased a few French and English papers and asked the shopkeeper where he might buy a cheap radio. The man behind the counter directed him to a shop two streets away. A short time later he returned to the car lugging the radio on top of his newspapers. M’barak frowned, but said nothing.
Back in his room, Laurent plugged in the radio and to his surprise received a clear, firm signal. Over the next two hours, he played with it like a little boy with a new toy, turning the dial, jumping from one station to another, picking up music and, more importantly, the news—in French, German, English and Spanish.
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