Like a sailor reading the winds, Laurent knew what allowances to make for the diverging views of the warring nations and the varying hand of government censors on the newscasts. Through their diverging prisms of nationalism, censorship, and ignorance, the stations might have been reporting events from different galaxies, but by listening to all of them, he started to piece together a picture of what was happening in the world.
As night fell, he hoped to bring in even more distant stations, but sudden bursts of static ruined the signal. Disappointed, but hopeful for better reception in the morning, he turned the radio off and lay back on his bed. He pictured the boy floating in the water and wondered if the boy had read the papers, if he had been stirred by the speeches of his leaders, if he knew why he had died.
That evening, Laurent put on one of his two remaining good shirts and waited for Rabia to come up and transmit Charlotte’s invitation to dinner. Instead, when she tapped on his door, he found her standing before him with his meal on a tray. Evidently, there would be no repetition of the previous night’s gathering.
Though he tried to tell himself he was disappointed, he knew he was also relieved that he would not have to sit through another unsettling evening with the villa’s enigmatic residents. He only regretted that he would not know if the man he had seen in the foyer with Charlotte the previous night would appear for dinner. Perhaps he had already left. Perhaps they remained together in her bedroom and neither he nor Charlotte wished to come down.
The thought was all the more painful for the knowledge that he had no right to feel such emotions. Yet he could not master the agitation in his heart, and, feeling like an oversensitive adolescent, he gave in to the compulsion to head downstairs to reassure himself that the others were not dining there without him.
He found the dining room deserted. A little ashamed of himself, Laurent was halfway back to his room when he heard the rapid click of high heels on the main stairway. He looked up to see Charlotte Dubois putting on a pair of earrings as she hurried down the stairs. Her eyes widened at the sight of the Frenchman.
“Ah, Rene, I was about to send Rabia to fetch you.”
The truth? A lie? Did he really care?
At the bottom of the stairs she took his arm, gesturing extravagantly as she spoke. “I feel like I’ve been cooped up all day and simply must get out for a while or go mad.”
She wore a silk dress of emerald green that quietly flattered her every curve. Laurent felt an unholy urge to lead her back to her room and take it off her. But the memory of the stranger she had taken upstairs the night before chilled his passion.
If she noticed any of this, she didn’t let on. “There’s a cunning little club at the Minzah Hotel,” she continued. “I’m meeting some friends there. I’m sure you’ll enjoy them. And a woman never wishes to arrive alone.” She flashed a smile. “We always want to appear with a handsome man on our arm. You know how it is,” she sighed extravagantly.
Laurent wasn’t at all sure he knew how it was, but, despite the transparency of her flattery, he could not resist feeling flattered. Despising himself a little for being so easily swayed, he bowed his head. “As you wish.” He’d meant the phrase to carry a load of irony, but, filtered through his own weakness, it came across as fawning.
“How sweet of you, Rene. Now, please, find M’barak and ask him to bring the car around.”
Torrence had told Laurent that the Minzah bar had been retaken by brandy-fueled French irregulars who had routed their enemies into a strategic withdrawal toward the Rif. The Germans, though, had not entirely conceded the field, and on this evening still occupied one side of the popular night spot. The Germans, who filled the room with their harsh accents, were decked out in a bewildering array of uniforms that Laurent could only hope reflected potential cracks in their seemingly monolithic war machine.
Seated with the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht officers were a few Spanish and Italian soldiers of similar rank, and a handful of meticulously groomed civilians in double-breasted suits. Women in evening gowns were sprinkled among them like diamonds. On the tiny bandstand, a trio of local musicians worked through a tired arrangement of “Night and Day.”
With a grace born of deeply layered experience, Charlotte gave the impression of ignoring the score of men who quietly swiveled their heads as she crossed the crowded room, though in fact, Laurent had never known a woman who didn’t know exactly how many eyes were on her at any given moment.
With the Frenchman in tow, she made her way to a large corner table where a party of three men and two richly decorated women greeted their arrival.
“Darlings!” Charlotte’s open-mouthed smile was calculated to charm them all. When she had obtained the desired effect she turned to Laurent. “Rene, this is Senor Graziano from the Italian consulate. He complains that he’s always working too hard, though he won’t tell me what he does.”
The rotund Italian bowed his head and smiled.
“And this is Lulu. You know the song, ‘Don’t Bring Lulu.’ Keep it in mind.”
There was much smiling and kissing of cheeks as she introduced the others, but Laurent’s attention had fixed on a tall, sandy-haired German in the uniform of a Wehrmacht major.
Something familiar in his stance made Laurent think they might have met once, though he could not recall where. He was about to dismiss the idea when, with a shock, he realized that this was the man he had seen embracing Charlotte in the foyer of the Villa Aeaea.
“Ah, Rene,” Charlotte said, interrupting his thoughts, “this is Peter. Or, more properly, Major Peter Wald . . . ” The major clicked his heels and bowed his head as she quietly added, “ . . . my husband.”
Later, Laurent recalled the evening as a masquerade of faultless manners covering an impenetrable veil of unspoken intentions. Despite the intriguing cast of characters around him, his attention turned time and again to the major. Behind his steely gaze and compressed lips, Peter Wald said little, but his eyes followed everyone. When Laurent stole a glance in his direction, he invariably felt the German had particularly been watching him. Laurent felt certain Wald sensed something between him and his wife.
Charlotte pretended not to notice the tension between the two men, but her eyes shone strangely and her smile betrayed an odd exaltation.
Yes, Laurent realized, she’s enjoying this. This is why she brought me.
Whatever Peter Wald’s feelings—towards his wife, towards Laurent—he maintained an outward graciousness. He made no mention of the war or Germany’s occupation of Laurent’s homeland, no boasts about how they would pluck Britain like a strangled goose.
Laurent realized that in different circumstances—having suffered no defeat from this man’s army, nor having slept with his wife—he might have rather liked Wald.
Through several bottles of wine and a few snifters of brandy, this polite truce maintained peace within the little party. An edge remained to Wald’s regard, but his manner grew more cordial as he and Laurent exchanged a few remarks on such safe topics as the weather, the wine, and the charms of Tangier.
Throughout the evening Laurent sat with his back to the rest of the room, so he first sensed the arrival of the new member of the party in the eyes of those around the table. When the Frenchman turned to greet the newcomer, he received his second shock of the evening.
Dark-haired and smiling, the man was of medium height and dressed in a dark brown suit. Despite the change in dress, Laurent recognized him as the man he had knocked down in his room at the Hotel Moulay Idriss.
It seemed somehow perfectly logical for this unknown figure with his English accent to take his place among these other dubious characters. As for the man himself, he betrayed no more than the twitch of an eyebrow, a slight downturn at the corners of his mouth, but it was clear he recognized Laurent, too. Equally clearly, he wanted the Frenchman to say nothing of their previous acquaintance.
Charlotte raised her hands in greeting and cried, “Roger! I was so hoping you might join
us this evening.”
The men rose to shake hands; the women held out their hands to be kissed.
The man turned to Laurent and thrust out his hand with peculiar violence. “Roger,” he said, introducing himself without supplying a surname. “A pleasure to meet you.”
Laurent no more believed his name was Roger than he believed Harris’s name was Harris. Standing this close, he caught a whiff of alcohol on the man’s breath and saw the redness in his eyes.
“Rene,” Laurent replied, cocking his head with what he hoped was appropriate irony. He was learning that this was the proper attitude with which to accept almost everything in wartime Tangier.
As Roger yanked a chair from a nearby table, ignoring another couple about to sit there, Laurent gauged the reaction of the others to this new arrival. At first he found nothing remarkable, but soon sensed that Charlotte’s seemingly natural manner was a bit too studied. And Wald’s cold eye glinted with something more than its natural guardedness.
A flash of light and a sudden pop so neatly underlined these unspoken revelations that it took Laurent an instant to understand that someone had taken their picture. Every head at the table snapped around and every smile disappeared behind a quick hand toward the face. Laurent suppressed a laugh he knew would not have been welcome.
A thin, little man with a camera stood before them, wearing an ill-fitting fez and a confused smile. Laurent had seen him wandering from table to table taking photos of each happy party and agreeing, for a small fee, to make copies as souvenirs of their evening at the Minzah. Accustomed to the usual festive ambience of the room and its patrons, he clearly didn’t know what to make of the hard-eyed expressions of those around this table, and took a step back as if he had stumbled onto a pack of wild dogs.
The one who called himself Roger reacted most strongly of all, his smile transformed by sudden anger. “You little bastard,” he said and started to rise.
“Roger.” Wald’s quiet warning put the Englishman back in his seat. The German turned to the stricken little photographer and smiled. “Thank you, but I don’t believe anyone cares for a photo this evening,” he said. He put a ten mark note in the man’s coat pocket and looked at everyone around the table to remind them that this was the way to deal with unwelcome surprises.
After the photographer’s departure, the air of elevated affability that had characterized the evening slowly reasserted itself. Roger smiled as if his show of emotion had been a good joke they could all share.
The new arrival said little to Laurent as the evening wore on, though Charlotte appeared to be always looking directly at the Englishman or directly away, with neither pose entirely natural. Laurent wished that, as in a foreign film, the conversation might contain subtitles to indicate what everyone’s words really meant.
It was well after midnight, with the energy slowly leaking out of the evening, when Wald took Charlotte’s hand and murmured something about the late hour. An anticipatory dread unsettled Laurent as he waited for Charlotte to put her arm through her husband’s and say goodnight to the rest of them, leaving him to calculate whether he should tag along behind them or call a taxi to take him back up to the villa, or perhaps more appropriately, back to the hotel from which Charlotte had plucked him weeks earlier.
Everyone around the table rose and made their goodbyes. The same cheeks were kissed, the same hands shaken, wraps draped over the same soft shoulders, the men’s jackets rebuttoned. Only Charlotte stayed seated, her eyes widening in what looked curiously like alarm. Still, her voice was cool as butter as she asked her husband, “So soon, darling?”
Wald looked at her then turned to the others. “I’m sorry. But I must fly back to Tunis tonight. The plane won’t wait for me.”
Laurent wondered if he saw murder in the German’s eyes as Wald glanced at him a last time, or only a warning, or perhaps nothing at all.
TWENTY-TWO
Silence filled the Citroen’s back seat as M’barak drove Charlotte and Laurent back to the villa through the city’s darkened streets.
Charlotte lit a cigarette, waved it out, and threw it into the ashtray. When she spoke, she didn’t look at Laurent, but gazed out through the side window at the darkness.
“When I told you I was married once, I suppose I should have added that I subsequently married once again.”
Laurent took his time before replying. “Your little confession isn’t the shock you may think. I know he came up to the villa last night. You greeted him in the foyer like Odysseus returning—or simply one more guest on Circe’s island.”
She raised her eyebrows at her reflection in the window. “Yes, I saw you skulking in the doorway. I almost called out ‘Olly, olly, oxen free,’ but Peter was tired and in no humor to meet anyone.”
“Tell me how you reconcile your contempt for fascism with your marriage to a Nazi.”
Charlotte leaned her forehead against the window and Laurent caught a shadow of her maddening smile.
“Peter? He’s not a Nazi—insists he will never join the Party. He’s a bit of a bore on the subject.”
“Yes, that must be very tedious. In the meantime, you sit in your mansion in Tangier, playing the grass widow.”
She half turned toward him, then apparently thought better of it. “You, of all people, have no right to judge me, or my politics, or the state of my marriage. Of course you’re a diplomat, so empty talk is your currency.”
The harshness of her words charged the atmosphere like sheet lightning. Now she turned her gaze fully on him and their eyes locked with the gravity of two planets hurtling toward each other. Charlotte’s mouth curled into a sneer while her eyes sent out a different challenge.
At that instant Laurent didn’t give a damn about M’barak sitting behind the wheel, or about Charlotte, either. He seized her by the shoulders and pressed his mouth against hers. With an outraged grunt, she kicked him in the shin. Without breaking his kiss—if it could even be called that—he pressed himself on her, shoving her against the door, not caring if it should pop open and the two of them tumble into the road, still locked in their violent embrace. With a guttural moan, she stopped struggling and put her hand behind his head, drawing him in.
When they pulled up in front of the entrance, the mistress of the Villa Aeaea took Laurent by the sleeve and they ran down the corridor to his room at the top of the stairs as if racing to see who could get there first.
Deep into the night, Laurent woke alone in his bed. He ran his hand over the empty sheets beside him, already cold, and told himself it didn’t bother him, that his resentment toward her had grown beyond repair, his desire for her spent.
The lie did not persuade even him.
With a rage directed as much at himself as at Charlotte, amplified by a physical longing bordering on obsession, he pulled on his trousers and made his way through the darkened house. At the bottom of the broad stairs leading to the second floor, he hesitated before telling himself this was a night for transgressing boundaries. He took the steps two at a time then strode down the hallway, his bare feet silent on the broad carpet.
When he saw the light spilling from the open doorway he felt certain she had left her lamp on to light his way to her bed.
It took him only two strides to see his mistake. The light came not from her bedroom but from the doorway next to it. As he stood in the hallway, uncertain if he should continue or retreat meekly back to his room, the shaft of light streaming through the open door was broken by the shadow of someone walking across the room. At the same time Laurent heard a heavy scraping, as of something being pushed across the floor. Above it floated the quiet whistling of a man in the midst of an agreeable task, enjoying his work.
Veering to the side of the corridor, Laurent sidled along the wall until he could peek around the doorframe.
Unaware of any presence but his own, Mohammed Snoussi whistled a popular tune from that summer as he pushed an empty wooden crate against the wall. With a swipe of his foot he sent a fe
w packing nails skittering across the floor before crossing to a wooden table against the opposite side of the room. On it sat a large black box dotted with dials and gauges.
The Moroccan pulled up a chair and, his back to Laurent, flipped a switch on the machine, which lighted up and began to emit a low hum. Dim lights glowed from its face, illuminating gauges whose needles bounced wildly for a moment before holding steady.
A similar, though smaller, machine rested on the floor near the remains of the wooden crate.
Though Laurent realized that his ability to spot an intelligence agent was not as strong as he had thought, his time in the Foreign Ministry had certainly taught him to recognize a radio transmitter.
And in that moment, Laurent also recognized what a fool he had been. This radio was the reason Charlotte had asked him to come to the Minzah that evening, why she had betrayed alarm when her husband took his leave earlier than she had anticipated, and why she had led him to his room rather than to hers when they returned to the villa. She hadn’t wanted him anywhere near the villa when the machine was delivered and unpacked.
The whole evening had been a cleverly staged appeal to his vanity, a long seduction to which he had eagerly yielded, getting him out of the house, and, later, away from the second floor. The blow to his pride hit him like a prize fighter’s haymaker.
Instead of knocking him out, though, it awakened him.
As silently as he had come, he crept back down the hall and returned to his room, where he slept well that night, certain now of what he would do.
When he got up the next morning, Laurent put on his suit, cleaned and pressed a few days earlier as if he had anticipated a return to his former self, and asked M’barak to take him downtown. There, he directed the driver to park in the familiar sunlit square near the port and told him to wait.
At the tobacco shop he bought a couple of English newspapers, not too badly out of date and asked for a postcard and a stamp. He wrote a number on the card, addressed it to the post office box of the International News Service, Mr. Harris, Manager, and dropped it in a mailbox.
Tangier: A Novel Page 16