Tangier: A Novel

by Stephen Holgate

  PART V

  FALL 1995

  TWENTY-THREE

  The message, left during the night in Chaffee’s box behind the front desk, seemed clear enough—and not clear at all.

  Handwritten in pencil on cheap paper, it read in clumsy French: “Meet me in the medina. Marsa Gate near the Grande Mosque. Ten-thirty tonight. I hold information about your father you must know.”

  There was no signature.

  Miloud Mansour said he had found it on the desk the previous evening, before he had locked the doors for the night, but had not seen who left it.

  Wordlessly, Chaffee set the note on the desk and turned it toward Mansour.

  The Moroccan read, lips pursed, and slowly shook his head. “Do not go, Monsieur Chaffee.”

  “Why?”

  “Whoever wrote this has little education.”

  “Why should I care how long he spent in school?”

  Looking at the note again, Mansour said, “He is an ignorant, penniless man. This sort is not worth knowing.”

  “I’m not going to have tea with him. I only want to find out what he knows.” He looked at the note. “Why ten-thirty, do you suppose?”

  “That is likely when he is through beating his wife—or, I think more likely, when his wife is through beating him.”

  For a long time Chaffee regarded the note, weighing Mansour’s prejudices against his own hopes. Finally, he looked up. “This is something I must do.”

  Miloud Mansour shrugged and gave Chaffee a sad little smile. “Then you must.”

  The Marsa Gate lay near the Grand Mosque. During the day, the area was choked with booths and wooden tables offering everything from tiny boxes of laundry detergent to cheap plastic toys and inexpensive headscarves. By evening, though, all the merchants had folded up and gone home, leaving the deserted street illumined only by light from the homes of the good people who had more sense than to be out in the street at this hour.

  Standing at the top of the steps leading up to the gate, blowing on his hands, Chaffee reflected that he had no such sense. He had been waiting more than thirty minutes and was very cold. His warm room at les Ambassadeurs grew increasingly appealing. The idea of going home also looked more attractive every minute.

  Mansour had advised him not to come. Chaffee at first assumed he saw some danger in the rendezvous. Now he began to believe that the hotel owner simply didn’t want to see him standing around in the cold making a fool of himself. He sensed that if he understood more about Morocco he would understand why the hotel owner so quickly dismissed the note and its writer—but Chaffee hadn’t allowed himself time to understand, and so had trusted his own instincts. And his instincts had once more proven wrong.

  After a last look around the deserted gate, he started down the steps, heading back to the hotel.

  “Monsieur.”

  Startled, Chaffee turned and looked into the shadows.

  “Monsieur,” the voice called again.

  It came from the darkness at the bottom of the steps. The cold, and his doubts, forgotten, Chaffee descended the steps to the street, but saw nothing.

  “I’m here,” Chaffee said into the darkness, the back of his neck tingling.

  From the shadows next to the steps, a figure stepped into the dim light thrown by a house across the street, then silently glided back into the darkness.

  “Come out here where I can see you,” Chaffee said.

  No response.

  Uneasy at the prospect of stepping into the dark corner where the man had retreated, Chaffee waited. The man’s odd, even sinister, behavior—the cryptic note, the late-night meeting, his refusal to stay in the light—excited Chaffee’s interest and recalled the scenes he had for weeks imagined, of mysterious strangers and clandestine meetings. His instincts had been right, after all, he told himself. His talents had not betrayed him.

  Peering into the shadows, he wondered what this man knew that was so frightful he did not wish to be seen. His mind went back to the implication left by Sands and the Spanish consul that Rene Laurent was mixed up with intelligence work. Might his father have truly been leading a clandestine life all these years, unable to contact those who had known him before? This man lurking in the darkness knew something of value, something worth paying for.

  His every nerve taut, yet his mind calm, Chaffee stepped near the shadows in which the man was hiding. He noticed that his hands were trembling. Before him, he could make out the ghostly form of a man—thin, tall, dressed in a burnoose, its hood pulled low, leaving his face invisible.

  “Here I am.” Chaffee stuck his hands in his pockets and squared his shoulders.

  The man said nothing.

  “You have information about my father?”

  He detected a bare nod of the man’s head.

  “About Rene Laurent?”

  The man nodded again.

  “What is it you know?”

  He sensed the man was afraid of him. It reminded him of talking to subordinates, back in Washington as they tried to work up the nerve to speak. Chaffee smiled to himself. This was the sort of conversation he knew how to conduct. “Well? Are you going to tell me or not?”

  “You have money?” The frightened man could barely whisper.

  “I have money. How much does your knowledge cost?”

  “Three hundred dirhams,” the man said, making the piddling sum—barely thirty dollars—sound like the fortune it probably represented to him.

  He must have seen the effect of his words on Chaffee. “Four hundred!” he corrected himself. “Four hundred dirhams!”

  Chaffee thought of faking a gasp, just to make the man feel better. “All right,” he said, and took out his wallet.

  As he counted out the four one-hundred dirham notes, the man inched toward the edge of the shadows. His bloodshot eyes, speaking of poverty and drink, darted nervously around the deserted street. He licked his lips, seemed to be working up the nerve to speak. Mansour had been right about one thing, he was a pathetic excuse for a man.

  Chaffee offered the notes in his hand, then slowly drew them toward his chest, making clear the man had to speak before he got the money. The American allowed himself a little smile and said, “Now, tell me what you—”

  The blow from the man’s fist came out of the darkness and knocked Chaffee to the pavement, the money fluttering into the air as he fell. The man kicked him, then scrabbled around the cobblestones, picking up the fallen bills. Before Chaffee could even cry out, the man had fled up the steps and into the medina.

  With a grunt of pain and humiliation, Chaffee rolled himself into a sitting position on the pavement. Shaking his head, he rubbed his cheek, the initial numbness from the shock of the blow already fading, his whole face now throbbing. He listened to the slap of sandals on the pavement as the man who had struck him disappeared into the darkness, carrying his money and the last of his dignity.

  Miloud Mansour glanced up from some paperwork as Chaffee returned to the Hotel les Ambassadeurs.

  “Monsieur Chaffee, you have a very bad—”

  “Just give me my key.”

  Saying nothing more, Mansour nodded politely and retrieved Chaffee’s key from his box.

  Chaffee started toward the stairs, but knew the Moroccan’s unasked questions deserved a reply. “Four hundred dirhams.” He rubbed his hand over his face and sighed. “That’s all he asked for. I was ready to give him a thousand.”

  Mansour squinted at the mark on Chaffee’s cheek. “He was too frightened to take that much. People like this are more comfortable stealing sums that match the poverty of their imagination.”

  “How did he know? Know about me?”

  In the ensuing silence, Chaffee thought Mansour wasn’t so much searching for an answer to his question as asking himself whether to reveal it to him. “Monsieur Chaffee, you are like a man struggling with his eyes closed, unaware of the spotlight on you. Everyone sees you. You see nothing.”

  Chaffee released a deep breath
and sagged against the desk. “I’m just a damned fool.” He took a quick inward breath, angry at himself for seeking pity. He dreaded the comforting words Mansour would feel obliged to give him.

  But Mansour simply shrugged and said, “Yes, Monsieur Chaffee, as you say.”

  Startled, Chaffee looked at Mansour, sure he was being mocked. When he looked in the Moroccans eyes though he saw only sincerity.

  The American hung his head and chuckled through his pain. When he looked up, Mansour was smiling with him.

  “From today, I will try to be less foolish,” Chaffee said

  “It is a slow process. It can take a whole life.”

  Chaffee touched the bruise on his face, though it didn’t feel as sore as the one to his pride. “You won’t tell anybody about this,” he told him.

  Mansour lowered his gaze and Chaffee knew he had disrespected the man.

  He tried to apologize. “I’m . . . I . . .”

  “Not to worry, Monsieur Chaffee. If you will go up to your room, I will send someone up with a bag of ice.”

  Chaffee nodded and made his way haltingly across the lobby. “And a couple of aspirin.”

  “Of course, Monsieur Chaffee.”

  Christopher Chaffee threw the evening newspaper onto the brass table. He was waiting for Draper to come down to the lobby so the two of them could go to the Minzah for the evening. He did not wish to be alone, and had come to realize that, however little he deserved it, he had a friend, one who would accept his company.

  When they had spoken earlier that day, Draper had looked at the bruise on his face but said nothing, and Chaffee had marveled at how circumspect people were here.

  His cheek throbbed. The bruise spoke roughly to him as he gently rubbed his cheek. The blow he had received at the Marsa Gate had shaken loose at least one truth; Chaffee had no trail to follow other than trying again to pry some truth out of the madman Drake. Yet he despaired of getting anything sensible from him. He feared the only thing keeping him in Tangier was the shame of returning home nearly as ignorant as when he had left.

  That wasn’t quite true, he admitted. The one result of his trip, the only revelation he had been privileged to grasp, was the slow realization of what a bastard he was, had been for many years, superior, arrogant, self-absorbed. He had been encouraged in these vices by his closest aides, the ones who lived not through themselves, but, vicariously, through him. Stripped now of his protective rank, his entourage of underlings, his manner invited only contempt. He was revealed even to himself as the hollow man he had become.

  There was one more thing. After days of wandering the streets of Tangier—the same streets his father had walked—talking to diplomats, a museum director, ancient spies, and an aging harridan, he had finally come to understand a simple truth: the reason he could not find his father, the man in the familiar photo, was that he had never existed. The real Rene Laurent, not the silent idol he had always measured himself against, had been a man like any other: talented, handsome, principled, but not unknowable, not untouchable. Just a man, perhaps not so terribly different from himself, except that his father had served his country out of a sense of duty and patriotism, while he himself had subverted duty to satisfy his own appetites and bury his insecurities. Until he found his father—and found whatever vestige of his father lived in himself—he would discover nothing but his own shortcomings.

  Overwhelmed by riptides of tortuous but half-formed emotions, he threw back his head and bellowed, “Enough!” Startled by his own outburst, he looked furtively around the empty lobby. “Enough,” he whispered. Enough of guilt, enough of shame, enough of lying. Enough of who he had become. He had abused his trust and he been caught at it. No point objecting that it wasn’t a big deal. It was enough. His fury at himself took its force from his embarrassment at being the man he was, of realizing that the cynicism in which he had taken such pride, had regarded as a mark of toughness, was simply the angry man’s form of naïveté.

  He leaned back in his chair, exhausted from wrestling with his soul.

  “Hey, Chris, ready?”

  The familiar voice startled him back into the here and now.

  “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

  A chill wind, a harbinger of the coming winter, was blowing off the Straits and the two Americans were happy to feel the warmth of the Minzah.

  Finishing his warm brandy, Draper smiled and said, “It’s good to get out of the cold, eh?”

  Chaffee smiled back at Draper. “Yes,” he said, and knew the rare pleasure of simply agreeing with someone, rather than taking their every assertion as something he needed to wrestle from them and make his own. “Yeah, Pete, it’s good.”

  The pianist looked away, a little embarrassed at Chaffee’s agreement, and rose from his seat. “Well, I got to get to work.”

  Draper was in particularly good form that evening, playing with a verve that brought the bar’s few clients, the ones with nowhere else to go on a Thursday evening, to occasionally stop their conversations and listen for a few moments.

  Chaffee listened to Draper for some time, then, brandy in hand, he rose, and as he had the first evening he’d visited the Minzah, wandered the room, gazing at the pictures on the walls. Humming along with the tune Draper was playing, he looked at the old photos from the bar’s storied past—the movie stars and writers, politicians and playboys who had passed through Tangier—some in color, others in black and white, commemorating evenings long forgotten, when these people, themselves now mostly forgotten, had owned the world.

  Draper finished his first set to a scattering of applause, and Chaffee started to turn away from the little gallery of pictures when something out of the corner of his eye rooted him in place. He stood frozen, taken with that peculiar form of incomprehension in which you can almost, but not quite, grasp what stands in front of you.

  Pleased with how his set had gone, Draper walked over and gave Chaffee a lopsided grin, clearly hoping for a compliment. But he found his companion’s attention taken by something else. “Whatcha looking at?”

  Chaffee could only nod at the photo hanging on the wall in front of him.

  The black and white shot showed a small party, eight or ten men and women, sitting around a table, all of them looking a bit startled at having their picture taken—all but one, a man with his back to the camera.

  Wordlessly, Chaffee tapped his finger on the image of a beautiful young woman in the act of raising her hand to her face.

  Puzzled, the pianist looked idly at the photo for a moment. Then his head snapped back as if he’d been struck. He looked at Chaffee and whispered, “Damned if it isn’t. I mean, a lot younger, but—”

  “Madame Dubois?”

  “Yeah.”

  Chaffee put his finger on another image, a man caught in profile, looking as if he were trying to avoid the lens. “Have you ever seen this man? Add as many years to him as you did to her.”

  Draper turned his head slightly as if to let his doubts get as clear a look as his eyes. “M-m-maybe.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure if—”

  “Don’t worry about being sure. Tell me what you think.”

  “At the Crepuscule. A couple of times. He came with some young kid.”

  “I’ll bet he did. What was he doing there?”

  Draper spoke slowly. “Well, I’m not exactly—”

  “Tell me what’s in your gut.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Strange guy. Didn’t stay long. Talked with Madame Dubois a while. Seemed kinda wound up.”

  “And her? Dubois?”

  A half smile wrinkled Draper’s face. “Same as always. Didn’t give a shit—about him, about anything.”

  “You’re saying she wasn’t happy to see him?”

  The gangly American blew out a breath. “Does she ever look happy about anything?” He squinted at the photo and shook his head. “Man, that’s an old picture. What would you say? About—”

  “Fifty-five years ago.�
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  Chaffee looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was paying attention to them. “I’m sorry, Pete, but I’ve got to go see someone.”

  Before Draper could ask who, much less why, Chaffee had whisked the photo off the wall, tucked it under his arm and walked out.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Christopher Chaffee pounded on the door of Drake’s apartment. The door opened a crack and started to close again. Before it could shut, Chaffee pushed his way inside.

  He had the impression that no one had moved since the first time he had spoken to Drake. Three young boys still sat slack-jawed before the television, transfixed by the images of their video game. Another stood behind the open door. The same boys as before? It didn’t really matter.

  As before, Drake sat on the couch, clutching the edges of a grimy bathrobe to his chest.

  “Who are you?” Drake asked, the words barely audible.

  Did he really not know? Chaffee decided that this didn’t matter, either.

  A smirk appeared on the old man’s face and he drew two fingers along his cheek. “Someone hit you.”

  “Shut up.” Chaffee stalked across the room straight at him. “You lied to me, you bastard.”

  Drake slid across the couch as if he might run. The edgy insolence Chaffee had seen on his previous visit had vanished. Even the man’s vulgarity had deserted him.

  The boys remained seated, fixed on the television screen.

  Chaffee shoved the photo he had stolen from the Minzah into the Englishman’s face.

  Drake put his hands up, as if afraid the American might strike him—or, Chaffee thought, to avoid looking at the picture.

  Chaffee jabbed his finger at a seated figure in the photo. “Tell me that’s not you.”

  “No.” Eyes bulging, Drake shook his head. “That’s Grant.”

  After days of stumbling in the dark, Chaffee felt himself careening toward the truth like a skier racing downhill, gravity pulling him at frightening speed.