Tangier: A Novel

by Stephen Holgate

  Having recovered his breath a little, Chaffee could at least keep her in sight, both of them weaving through the throngs in the lane, up one alley and down another, twisting through the crooked lanes until Malika darted through a doorway. Chaffee followed, realizing he would have passed by without recognizing it.

  Could the boys, faster and with a long head start, have had enough time to do what Drake had sent them out to do? Fear squeezed his chest, deep and painful, and he wondered if his quest might kill him before he reached its end.

  He stumbled into the courtyard. “Malika!” He spun around, looking for her. From above, he heard a faint pounding and looked up to find her running along the gallery before disappearing through an open doorway. Chaffee ran up the stairs after her, and, an instant later, stood at the open door.

  In the dim light, he saw Malika leaning over a huddled form lying on the bed, blankets thrown onto the floor.

  “Monsieur Sands.” The form did not move. Gently, she repeated his name, “Monsieur Sands.” Her voice rising with fear, she shook his shoulder. “Gordon.”

  When the pressure in Chaffee’s chest had risen so high in his throat he couldn’t breathe, the form under the sheets stirred.

  “Ah? Ah. Sarah?” he called in the uncertain voice of an old man shaken from his shallow slumber. “Sarah?”

  Malika’s eyes begged Chaffee to excuse Sands’ wandering mind.

  Of course, Chaffee thought, his wife’s name.

  “No. I am Malika.”

  “Ah.” A long pause. “Malika.”

  In the dim light of the room, Malika’s smile shone like a star.

  Chaffee felt his knees tremble with relief. “Ah, you’re still alive.”

  “Who said I wasn’t?” Sands muttered. He squinted into the darkness. “Who are you?”

  “It’s me, Christopher Chaffee.”

  “Chaffee?”

  “I came to see you some days ago. You spoke to me of Pickford Drake.”

  “Drake?” Then he knew. “Drake,” he repeated with a full measure of loathing. “We spoke here, in the library, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “But what has that . . . ” He grunted in impatience, unable to come up with the words he needed.

  “I believe he sent someone to harm you.”

  “Harm? Me?” Wisps of confusion still dragged at the old man. “In bed?”

  “He tried to poison your tea.”

  This outrage woke him completely. “Poison my tea? That savage and unnatural Briton!” He thought it over. “Sounds just like the crapulous villain.” He sat up, his eyes clear. “But why now?”

  “I’m not sure. I might have said something about you that he saw as a threat.”

  “Chaffee. Chaffee. Yes, I remember you. You think you might have said something that. . . ?” He cocked his head at the American. “Well, you do have a way about you.”

  “In fact, you knew my father, didn’t you?”

  Sands closed his eyes and passed an unsteady hand across his face. “Your father?”

  “Rene Laurent.”

  Sands gripped his temples with his twig-like fingers, trying to squeeze out the memories lodged inside. “I don’t know. No. But the name. Perhaps I knew the name . . . Something about Drake and a woman and a Frenchman. Did I ever know more?” He shook his head, lost. “I should never have sent you to see him. Too dangerous. I regret—”

  “I’ve got to stop him.”

  “Yes, well, I’m all for that. I have a pistol if you want it. I mean ‘mad dogs and Englishmen’ . . . and this reprobate is both.”

  Chaffee shook his head. “I’m going to go see him.”

  “Unarmed?” He considered the thought. “Still, it’s better than calling in the police. They’d muck it all up. Probably clap you in irons and make Drake a prince of the realm.”

  “I’m not worried. He’s nothing more than a husk of whoever he used to be.”

  “There was never much to him, not really. One of the hollow men.” Sands snorted in amusement. “I heard that during the war he was going through someone’s room. Some civilian. And he let the fellow come up behind him and deck him.” The old man chuckled. “I would have enjoyed seeing that.” Sands nodded and sank back into his pillow, wearied by the commotion. “Well, go do what you have to do.”

  “I’m just glad you’re still alive.”

  “My own gratitude is limited at the moment.”

  The old man looked at Malika, pressed her hand, and smiled fondly while she picked the covers from the floor and pulled them over him.

  With a last glance at the ancient spy again settling into sleep, Chaffee walked out the door and into the street.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Thinking he would flag down a taxi, Chaffee started walking toward Drake’s apartment. The conversation with his mother had burned away any sense of obligation toward her or anyone. He was doing this for himself now.

  For all his desire to put the screws to Drake, he wasn’t yet sure what he would say. If Drake held a higher estimation of the Moroccan police than Sands did, or at least a greater fear, the threat of an attempted murder charge might squeeze out of the Englishman whatever he knew of Rene Laurent, particularly why the Spanish might have followed him and why the Germans told them to stop. Most of all, he wished to follow up on Drake’s vague hint that his father might still be alive, living in Fez.

  He also wanted to know if two young boys could really be sufficiently depraved by contact with Drake that they would knowingly murder a man for him.

  By the time he had thought all this through he was close enough to Drake’s apartment that he had no need for a taxi. Once again he climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Halfway down the corridor he saw Drake’s door hanging open and feared what he would find—Drake’s belongings scattered around the dreary apartment and the old spy flown.

  Cursing himself for his slowness, he nearly ran into the two boys he had seen in the medina as they burst out of Drake’s doorway and dashed past him without a glance, the video game equipment clutched in their arms and terror in their eyes. Pushed by the horror he had seen in their faces, Chaffee ran toward Drake’s door.

  Instead of chaos, he found the apartment in no more than its usual squalid state—and eerily silent. Only the television was out of place, pulled away from the wall when the boys stripped the game from it. A coffee pot steamed on the kitchen counter.

  “Drake! Drake!” He felt an unholy shudder, sensing he would get no answer.

  Chaffee went through the doorway that led toward the back of the apartment.

  The bedroom door hung wide open and a sharp, repellant odor had crept into the hallway. For a moment Chaffee thought of turning around and, like the boys, fleeing down the corridor. But he knew he had foreclosed that possibility when he walked through the door.

  Clothing lay scattered on the bed next to an open suitcase. Bedclothes were strewn on the floor. Drake’s robe was wadded up and thrown across an overturned chair. It seemed that Drake had indeed thought of running, but changed his mind.

  The Englishman lay on the floor, naked, twisted into a fetal position as if trying to get out of this world the same way he had come in.

  There was no need to check if he was dead or wonder what had happened. Grant had risen up from inside his host, Drake, and taken his last victim; himself.

  A brown stain spreading across the cheap rug from a broken coffee cup would undoubtedly show he had taken the same poison he had meant for Sands.

  “My God,” Chaffee whispered when he realized that Drake must have poisoned himself while the boys were still there, as soon as they told him that his plan to kill Sands had failed. He had thrashed around and vomited in his death throes, knocking over furniture, and finally died on the floor of his wretched apartment.

  Odd, chilling, that the boys had the presence of mind to steal the old man’s toys on the way out. Like them, Chaffee wanted only to get out. Pushed by revulsion and a chorus of ghosts, he made his way
down the steps and out into the street.

  He said nothing, tried to think of nothing, until he walked into the lobby of the Hotel les Ambassadeurs, where Miloud Mansour’s steadfast presence assured him the world had not gone entirely mad.

  He walked up to the desk and said, “Monsieur Mansour, I need to report a death.”

  They waited a long time for the police to arrive. Chaffee sat in the lobby, too tired to go up to his room and, despite Ross’s assurances, worried that they might be aware of the Interpol cable about his indictment and take him in. Trying to take his mind off his own troubles, he asked Mansour if Draper was around.

  “He played in Asilah last night. I think he is still sleeping, Monsieur Chaffee. Would you like me to wake him?”

  “No. Let him sleep.” He chewed over his next question for some time. “What do you two talk about?”

  Mansour cocked his head quizzically. “Pardon?”

  “You and Draper. I mean it’s none of my business, but . . . I’ve wondered.”

  The hotel’s owner waggled his head. “We talk of this and that, of what any two men might talk about.”

  “Yes. Of course.” Chaffee nodded, knowing he deserved no better answer.

  A long paused filled the room before Mansour said, “May I come over and sit with you?”

  A few days earlier, this would have struck Chaffee as the most egregious effrontery. Now he wished nothing better. “Yes. Please.”

  The Moroccan came out from behind his desk and settled into the seat next to Chaffee. “You have had a very difficult day.”

  “I have.”

  “I think all this has to do with your search for your father, yes?”

  Feeling every day of his fifty-five years weighing on his soul, Chaffee could only nod.

  “I am sorry for it, Monsieur Chaffee.”

  “Thank you.” Chaffee slumped in his chair. “I think I should never have come.”

  Mansour nodded sympathetically. “There are moments when we wish we had never been born.”

  “This is one of them.”

  “But we are not given that option, are we?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “We stumble around all our lives trying to find the truth—if we have the courage to try. But we discover it’s too big for us. We will never understand it. Then we can either grow cynical, reject everything, or we can become humble and settle for what little we manage to understand.”

  Part of Christopher Chaffee, the part that had risen near the top of Washington’s treacherous pyramid, wanted to smile and shake his head at the Moroccan’s naïveté. The part of him that had, these past few weeks, been searching through the maze of Tangier’s twisted paths nodded in agreement.

  The silence of mutual contemplation settled over the lobby.

  After a bit, Mansour picked up the thread of the conversation. “We talk about music. Draper and I. We talk about our lives and our countries. We talk about God.”

  “God?”

  “Is there a better topic for men approaching a certain age?”

  “Draper doesn’t seem to me the spiritual type.”

  “What artist isn’t spiritual? And you’ve heard him. He is an artist. Perhaps you are simply not yet the person with whom he feels sufficiently comfortable to talk about such things.”

  It could not have been more gently stated, but Chaffee sighed with regret.

  “He has needed a friend, Monsieur Chaffee. Someone from his own country he could feel at ease with. Even more, I think you have needed to be a friend and have been too fearful to allow it. I am sorry to tell you this.”

  Chaffee tilted his head back and gazed at the ceiling for a long time. “No. You are simply telling me the truth, being my friend.”

  The two men walked into the lobby near dark. Their cheap suits, shiny with age but impeccably clean, their manner—as earnest as any pair of funeral directors—and their evident certainty that everyone finally had to answer to them marked them as policemen as surely as if they had been wearing badges.

  They asked to see Chaffee’s passport and riffled through its pages, nodding to each other about things he could not guess at. He felt his body grow hot and sweat form on his back. The two policemen quizzed him for over an hour, asking him to repeat several times his story of finding Drake dead in his apartment, sniffing for the odor of inconsistency or the stench of hidden guilt.

  Chaffee told them that Drake was a friend of his late father’s. Yes, he had seemed unwell recently.

  Could this man Drake have been in despair about his life?

  Chaffee wanted to ask who wasn’t. Instead, he only said it was possible.

  What brought Chaffee to Tangier?

  “The waters.”

  “Pardon?”

  The American shook his head. “Nothing.”

  He told them his father had died during the war and there had always been some uncertainty about the manner of his death. He had thought Drake might know what had happened.

  And?

  Drake apparently knew nothing.

  Why had Chaffee waited all these years to find out?

  His mother was unwell and wanted to know the truth before she died.

  Had he met anyone else while he was in Morocco?

  Only a fellow American named Draper, also staying in the hotel.

  The two policemen were losing interest in him. Apparently they knew nothing about the charges against him back home. They asked a few more questions, had him repeat his story once more, less interested in his answers than in the possibility he might trip himself up.

  Chaffee didn’t kid himself. These guys had been too long at their job to miss the fact that he was hiding something. Freed from the worry that they wished to arrest him based on the Interpol advisory, he casually interjected that he had recently left his position as head of an agency of the United States Government and dropped the name of the American ambassador a couple of times. This made them cautious. These were waters in which they knew not to swim.

  At length, one of them—heavyset, with a thin mustache that made him look like Gomez Addams—folded up his notebook and nodded at his colleague to do the same. After offering up polite official smiles, the two men rose. Chaffee did the same, like a gracious host saying goodbye to a couple of guests who had stayed a little longer than they should have. They hoped they had not inconvenienced him, the heavyset man apologized. As for Drake, worn down by age and infirmities and who-knew-what accumulated torments, he had clearly taken his own life for reasons sufficient to himself. The detective regretted any grief Chaffee had suffered over the death of his family friend and thanked him for his cooperation.

  Oh, by the way, could they have a moment with his friend, what was his name? Draper?

  “Draper? Draper had nothing to do with any of this.”

  “No doubt,” the policeman said, “Still . . . ”

  With an icy look at Chaffee, Mansour obeyed the policemen’s request to call Draper down to the lobby.

  They put a few polite questions to him and seemed satisfied with his answers. Looking terribly vulnerable without his toupee, Draper glanced at Chaffee and said nothing of Madame Dubois or the picture Chaffee had stolen from the Minzah.

  The policemen with the mustache nodded and asked Draper, “Could I see your passport?” He smiled. “Just routine.”

  Draper said he didn’t have it on him.

  The policeman told him they’d be happy to wait while he went to his room.

  Unlike the other American, this one did not mention the Ambassador or the United States Government. The policemen smiled. They would not be going back empty-handed.

  Walking like a condemned man, the gangly musician headed back upstairs.

  Chaffee avoided looking at Mansour, but felt the Moroccan’s eyes on him.

  When Draper returned, the man with the mustache thumbed through his passport a couple of times and frowned.

  “You seem to have only a tourist visa here. One that expired so
me time ago.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m going to get it renewed.”

  “Yes, of course.” The policeman nodded politely. “Yet, you have been working.”

  Draper dropped his head and shrugged.

  They asked him if he would come down to the station with them to talk a little further.

  Everyone in the little lobby knew it wasn’t a request.

  When Draper asked if he could go up and get his coat, they were all smiles. Yes, of course. It was chilly outside. They were not unreasonable men.

  Draper looked at Chaffee, saw the stricken look on his face. “S’okay, Chris,” he said in English. “They’ll just boot me out. They won’t throw me in—” He smiled awkwardly and shrugged once more. A few moments later Draper and the two policemen went out the door together, like old friends, leaving Chaffee standing alone in the middle of the lobby.

  “You needn’t worry, Monsieur Chaffee, he will not betray you.” Something in Mansour’s tone implied that this was better than Chaffee deserved.

  Chaffee could not bring himself to look at the Moroccan. “Of course he won’t,” he said. “I know he’s a friend and—” He couldn’t speak around the lump in his throat.

  Draper walked into the lobby sometime past midnight, tired but otherwise unharmed.

  “Hey, Chris,” he said, when he saw his fellow American. He nodded toward the desk. “Miloud.”

  “It is good to see you, Peter,” Mansour said with a smile.

  “Good to be back. Those aren’t the guys to spend a long evening with.”

  “I was worried about you,” Chaffee said.

  “Well, thanks.” The expression of concern seemed to embarrass him. He waggled his head and turned to Mansour. “But I’m afraid you’re going to be losing your best customer.”

  The Moroccan bowed his head at this obvious truth.

  “They’re being good about it. I’ve got ten days to leave the country.” He gave a little laugh. “But maybe I’ll just stay. They’ll have probably forgotten all about me in ten days.”

  The hotel owner shook his head slightly. “Be careful, Peter.”