Tangier: A Novel

by Stephen Holgate

With a long breath, like the last hiss of air from a punctured tire, all the energy seemed to leak out of the musician. “Yeah. Maybe. We’ll see.”

  Chaffee rose and extended his hand. “Pete, I’m . . . uh. This is my fault.” He hadn’t realized how hard this would be. “I’m sorry.”

  Draper looked at Chaffee’s hand as if it were an unexpected gift and shook it warmly. “Don’t worry too much about it. I figured they’d catch up to me one of these days.” He suddenly smiled. “Maybe I’ll have to go home and become a success now.”

  Chaffee nodded toward the steps. “I’ll walk up with you.”

  Draper shook his head. “Nah. That’s all right. I’m kinda wound up. I’m gonna stay up for a little while. Talk to Miloud.”

  “Sure.”

  “Hey, I really appreciate you waiting up for me. You didn’t have to.”

  “Hey. What’s a friend for?”

  It was nearly noon by the time the train dropped Chaffee off in Asilah and he found his way back to the restaurant above the beach.

  A woman setting tables told him, “We’re closed. Open at twelve.”

  Chaffee continued across the dining room toward the bar.

  The bartender, his back to Chaffee, was wiping glasses and setting them onto the shelves. At the end of the bar, the owner’s table stood empty. It was like looking out at New York harbor and seeing that the Statue of Liberty had walked away. Only the parrot remained at its post, hopping nervously on its perch, like a black cat waiting for its witch to return.

  “Where is Madame Dubois?” Chaffee asked the man behind the bar.

  The bartender set another glass on the shelf but didn’t turn around. “She hasn’t come in yet.”

  “Where can I find her?”

  The man cocked his chin vaguely toward the outside world. “At home.”

  Chaffee stood at the bar without moving.

  Still without looking at the American, the barman said, “Two streets from here, toward the middle of town.”

  “What’s the number?”

  “No number. A name. Aeaea. Villa Aeaea.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Squeezed by larger homes to each side, the modest one-story house didn’t rate the term villa, Chaffee thought. With its plaster-softened edges and its thin wash of blue, it looked more like a melting ice-cube. Yet a pair of painted tiles, scarred and oversized, as if they had been chipped from a much larger house and reattached here, confirmed it as the Villa Aeaea.

  What the hell kind of name was that, Chaffee asked himself. He opened the low iron gate that bordered the handkerchief of a lawn and walked up to the door. When he got no response to his knock he tried the knob. It was unlocked. He walked in.

  The opaqueness of the dark interior made Chaffee wonder if light had ever entered the room. It smelled of cumin and cooking oil, cigarettes, and a sharp unpleasant smell of decay.

  “Bon. Monsieur Chaffee. I didn’t think it would take you this long to come back and see me.” Her voice came from somewhere in the surrounding darkness.

  “Is there a light in this place?”

  With a soft click, a table lamp came on.

  She sat in an overstuffed chair that dwarfed her thin figure, sitting so still that Chaffee could almost believe she spent her days sitting in the dark. Or had his knock on the door caused her to materialize from the ether? He was ready to consider either possibility.

  With an uneven smile she might have thought coquettish, she reached into an ebony box, pulled out a cigarette and fixed it to the end of her long black holder. For a longish time she sat without moving, as if posing for an ad in an expensive magazine. Finally she sighed and asked. “You have a light?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  She grunted. “Of course not.” She picked up a lighter from the end table and lit it herself.

  “So, what brings you back to me?”

  “I have a picture.”

  He crossed the shadowy room and, as he had with Drake, held out the photo he had taken from the Minzah.

  She gazed at it for a long time.

  “Where in the world did you get this?”

  “I stole it from the Minzah.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, the hint of a smile on her lips. “Oh, well done. But why are you showing it to me?”

  He tapped a figure in the photo. “Tell me who that is.”

  She leaned forward, squinted. “Such a pretty girl,” she sighed. “I loved that dress.”

  “That’s you, isn’t it? Charlotte Dubois.”

  She shrugged. “Charlotte Dubois. Charlotte Wald. It’s all the same, isn’t it?”

  Working to control his temper, he pointed to another figure. “And that’s Drake.”

  “Drake?” She raised her eyebrows. “That’s the one you mentioned before, isn’t it? I knew him as Grant. I’m sure one of us is right.” She smiled and raised her eyes at him. “Perhaps both of us.”

  “Who is this? In the German uniform. Sitting next to you.”

  To his surprise, her act dropped away and she looked at the man in the photo with a vulnerability Chaffee hadn’t imagined she would allow herself. For a passing moment, he could see how she might once have been beautiful. Then it was over, and she put the mask back on. “That would be my husband. Sitting next to the insufferable Lulu.”

  His eyes on her ruined face, he tapped the photo once more. “This is the one I want you to look at. The one with his back to the camera, looking at you. Who is this?”

  She leaned back and waved her cigarette, forming arabesques of smoke that obscured her face. “That’s your father, of course.”

  Her offhand tone struck Chaffee dumb.

  She smiled at his surprise. “I knew it the moment you came through the door at la Crepuscule. Even with, well, a little more weight and a little less hair, you look just like him.” She took a drag at her cigarette. “So, tell me, am I supposed to congratulate you? I suppose I should give you something, but I’m all out of prizes.”

  “You know what you need to do. You need to tell me the truth.”

  Her eyes hardened. “You have no idea what I need.”

  “You owed Drake something. That’s what he told me. Something from the war.”

  “I owe him nothing.”

  “That’s why he came back here from England, isn’t it? He told me you owed him money.”

  “Owed him? I gave him everything he had coming, except a bullet in the back of his head.”

  “Why did he come back after all this time?”

  She blew out an impatient breath. “Nothing very mysterious. He’s been pestering me for weeks to—”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Ah.” She blinked and fell silent. For a long time she stared at the photo. Her toss of the head was only another pose. “Well, good for him. What a tiresome man.”

  “Poisoned himself.”

  “Saved someone else the bother.”

  “Why did he think you owed him enough money to make it worth his while to come back to Morocco?”

  Her answers came more slowly now, calculated. “A pity you didn’t have a chance to ask him. I’m sure he would have given you quite an answer—if he wasn’t too gaga to remember, or to invent something.” She took a long deep pull and blew the smoke toward Chaffee. Of course it smelled of kif.

  “Why did Drake—?”

  “We had a business arrangement.” She waved her cigarette holder to dismiss its importance. “Currency market. Some things went right. Some things went wrong. It lasted for quite a while, really. And when it came time, he was in no position to ask for his share. He was back in London by then. Hardly my fault.”

  “And my father? He knew this?”

  “Knew? He was part of it at the beginning, but he grew tired of our arrangement, fled elsewhere without explanation. And Grant, well, he was . . . ahh . . . forced to relocate. Fortune’s of war. ‘All’s fair.’”

  “He didn’t think so.”

  She shrugged philosophically
. “No, I suppose not.”

  “You say my father was mixed up in this?”

  She considered the question for a moment. “Yes. But not in a way he understood.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Her smile cooled and her eyes narrowed. “You’re becoming tiresome. Like Grant.”

  “Was this arrangement, as you call it, the reason the Spanish were following my father?”

  The question surprised her. “How in the world did you know that?” Her chuckle sounded like a dog’s growl. “No. That was my husband’s doing.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  She looked at him in disbelief. “You silly man.” Her speech, already slow, took on an amused detachment, as if seeing the whole thing from a great distance. “He wanted to know if his wife was being unfaithful to him.” She studied the effect of her words on Chaffee’s face.

  “And your husband was the one who had them stop. Because . . . ”

  “Because he’d found out what he wanted to know.” She smiled as if this were all a sly prank.

  “So when your husband called them off, it wasn’t because my father had started working for the . . . ”

  “For the Germans?” She cackled. “What an idea. If your father participated in our little plan, it was because he thought he was working with Grant and the British. But Grant, at least on this matter, was working for me. There’s the joke.”

  “So, he wasn’t intending to help you. He was playing the spy.”

  “Oh, yes. Playing the spy. Me? I was just trying to steal some money. But if I were to put it that way no one would have helped me.” She tipped the ash of her cigarette onto the floor. “Everyone wants to be a spy. No one wants to be a thief.”

  “But he figured it all out, my father.”

  “That we were both betraying him, Grant and I? Yes. Your father may have had that charming innocence, but he was no fool. When he finally understood what was happening, he was quite disillusioned. About all of us. Axis. Allies. I think he just gave up at that point.” She took a deep breath and looked away, her thoughts drifting elsewhere. A full minute passed before she nodded toward a buffet set against the far wall of the room.

  “Open the top drawer. You’ll find a flat box.”

  He did as she asked and brought it to her.

  With the slow, deliberate moves of someone defusing a bomb, she removed the lid. Inside lay a scattering of old photos. Charlotte Dubois spread her hands and mused over the photos, muttering words Chaffee could not make out, shuffling them around like the magician’s cups that hide the pea.

  Chaffee glimpsed photos of guests around a dinner table, men and women posing in front of large buildings, grave men in bygone uniforms—all of them in black and white, all of them taken at a distance, the photographer seemingly reluctant to get too near her subjects.

  The old woman’s hands stopped. “Ah, here we are” she said. Taking a small photo by its edges, she held it out to Chaffee. “Here.”

  At first he could make little of it—a young man in shirtsleeves, hands in his pockets, standing in front of a rock formation, squinting into the lens, the sea behind him. Or was he frowning, annoyed at having his picture taken? Perhaps he—Chaffee’s mind skidded to a stop. “My God.”

  Her satisfied chuckle told him what he needed to know.

  “Your father was quite handsome, no?”

  For more than fifty years Chaffee had pictured him wearing that one suit, his expression distant, dignified, self-contained. Anything that might have made him look real had been bled away by the photographer’s art. Yet here he was, young and vital. A man.

  “He looks like just a regular guy,” he said at last.

  The corners of Charlotte’s mouth turned down. “I suppose.”

  Even she appeared different to him now. He could imagine her with her friends at the Minzah, wearing the dress she loved. Surely at some point she had been just a regular girl.

  Overwhelmed, Chaffee closed his eyes. When he opened them he asked the one question he didn’t want to hear answered. “Did you love him?”

  Charlotte Dubois waved her hand and uttered a soft “pah!” She looked at the photographs for a long time then leaned back in her chair. “Who knows? Who knows?” She turned her head to one side so that she didn’t need to look at the photo of the handsome young man any longer. “Put it away. Put them all away. I shouldn’t have looked at them.”

  Chaffee considered keeping the photo of his father, but seeing him like this had already changed his image of the man who was his father. Instead, he put the photo back in the box and closed the lid.

  “Where is he?” he asked quietly.

  She turned away, one side of her face in the soft light of the desk lamp, the other in darkness.

  “Where is he?” Chaffee repeated.

  “Just because Grant—Drake—tells you he’s heard some rumor that he’s still—”

  “Is he still alive?”

  She breathed slowly. “The last I knew.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.” She took a lungful of kif and waited for it to speak. “In Fez, I think. He’s been there for years.”

  “Fez?” The same thing Drake had told him. Chaffee worked to keep his voice even. “Why Fez?”

  “Ask him. I don’t know.”

  “How do we find him?”

  “We? No. There is no ‘we’ here. Just go away and leave me alone.”

  He stood his ground, not resolute, simply unable to think of anything else. However he might dislike the fact, the path to his father passed through this old woman.

  For a long time she kept her head turned away, as if her refusal to acknowledge him might make him disappear. When she finally spoke, she could not look at him.

  “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll come with you.”

  Chaffee’s suspicion of the old woman was bottomless. “When are we doing this?” he asked.

  “Now.” She rose slowly from her chair. “I have to get some things.”

  He walked across the room to put the box of photos away. Only when he had put them in the drawer and pushed it shut did he notice the framed photo sitting on the buffet, just as his father’s photo sat on the buffet back home. The sight of it froze him in place.

  “You asked me who I loved,” the old woman said to his back, her voice growing firmer with each word. “I loved that man. The one in the picture. Did I love your father? Did I love my husband? Yes, maybe. But my husband was Abwehr, worked with Canaris, and they looked down on him. Despised him. ‘The corporal’ they called him and fell over themselves to betray him. My husband would have, too.”

  Chaffee asked quietly, “And my father?”

  “Detested him.” She paused, her face shining, a dreamy smile on her face. “But, oh, if only he had been victorious. Then the world would have seen how glorious . . . Everything would have been different.”

  Chaffee didn’t try to hide his revulsion.

  She looked at him and rolled her eyes. “I forget. You’re an American, a naïf.”

  “A naïf,” he repeated, trying to get his head around this unexpected prospect. “I’ve been called a lot of things . . . And you’re French, a born cynic.”

  “I’m Swiss. After the war everyone thought I was French and I was too weary to argue with them.”

  Chaffee thought for a long time before saying. “I don’t think I wish to—”

  “Go to Fez with me? But you’ll never find your father without me. You don’t know this country, these people. I do.”

  She watched him think it over, saw him give in.

  “Good,” she said, “My car is in a garage off the main square. I’ll get the keys.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  “I once owned such a beautiful car,” she said, looking at her tiny Renault. “Your father drove it. I liked how he drove. Something very masculine about it. This one?” She crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her chin at it. “Bouf! It is not the sort of car o
ne can drive well. I’m not sure one can even drive it poorly.” She regarded it a moment longer and shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t use much gas.”

  She told him it would be a four- or five-hour drive. They would stay at the Palais Jamais in Fez. The hotel would give him a toothbrush.

  While he backed out of the garage he asked her how they would manage to find his father.

  “He will be living in the old medina. That is where one goes to disappear. The medina is its own world. Only the people who live there know anything about it—and they know everything. If he is still there—”

  “You mean, if he’s still alive.”

  “—someone will know.”

  They drove east on a slow, winding road through difficult country and Chaffee was content to concentrate on his driving.

  Two hours after they had left Asilah they reached the main road and turned south.

  With each mile closer to Fez, Chaffee felt his heart beat faster, his hands less steady on the wheel, like a little boy waiting for Christmas. He remembered the few photos he had seen of Fez and tried to put his father in them, walking down a narrow lane or drinking coffee at an outdoor café. What would he say when he found him? “Rene Laurent, I am the son you never knew you had.” If they truly looked so much alike, he might not have to say even this. Then it struck him, hard: if they truly looked so much alike, his father would be old and bent, fat and bald. It was an abhorrent thought. Even when he had resented him the most, he had always seen him as in the photo, young and energetic, a shooting star caught on the ascent. He was not prepared to see what time had done to his image of his perfect father.

  He sighed because he knew something else, something worse; whatever his own accomplishments, he had been stuck in a loop, had never really grown up. He had lived in perpetual rebellion against his father and what he believed in. How could he have wasted his life in such pointless combat? For weeks he thought he had been looking for his father, and only now did he realize he had finally found himself.

  Suddenly he didn’t want anything more to do with any of it. He only wanted to go home. His quest, such as it was, had ended. He was about to turn the car around when Charlotte said, “Rene, pull over here.”