Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  Laforche flicks out what he thinks is the last bit of polish – it isn’t, and he will dislike me even more when he realises – and sits up straight.

  ‘I’m sure you are aware, Monsieur, that the Asylum is where they brought Rimbaud in from the desert.’

  So this is the game: humiliate the hick foreigner.

  I assume my blandest expression and say to the irate puffball opposite, ‘Rambo? The American action man with the red headband?’

  The puffball swells further. ‘The famous French poet, Monsieur! Le symboliste, follower of Baudelaire, un ami du Verlaine. He came to the desert to die.’

  I nod as though I am pretending to know what he is talking about, even though I do know what he is talking about and am just pretending to pretend to know.

  I eat a date – and another two – and drink the mint tea. Dust irritates my ear drum.

  ‘So Monsieur Deviling – ’

  ‘Devlin.’ I extract my business card. ‘John Devlin.’

  Laforche holds the card by one corner, away from him. ‘Our doctors – ’

  ‘ – are very, very qualified.’ I reach for my briefcase. ‘But – ’

  He raises his voice. ‘Monsieur, how can you talk to this poor disturbed woman? A woman who runs into walls because she says she wants to climb inside a pebble? She is in the hospital now.’ He shakes his head.

  I look at Laforche’s gleaming hair. Is it dyed? Maybe not. He is in his middle fifties – the same age as the husband of the woman – but older than me by a decade. I wonder if he is in love with her.

  ‘What she did to her face . . . ’ His voice is actually fading.

  I bite my lip as if shocked. It is not completely an act. I did see the photos.

  ‘How you can talk to her if you do not even know who Rimbaud is?’

  Baffling. I am ground between two intractable ways of thinking: the hard, cutting lines of the stars and bars of the great US of A, with its aisles of pills in neon-lit mega-stores, and this land of endlessly shifting curves and veiled ambiguities, of ancient herbs in tiny cut-glass bottles. I imagine living in a world of sand where footprints are constantly erased. I suppose our symbol would be the moon’s crescent too. Something that reshapes itself. Disappears.

  I pat the briefcase. ‘Monsieur.’ It sounds like “mon sewer”. I say, ‘Her family authorises – ’

  ‘How do they know who she is?’ he says. ‘She does not know. We do not know.’

  ‘Well, the people who are interested believe they know.’

  He looks through the window, past the helicopter parked in the shadow of the high stone walls, to the Kabir Massif. Sheets of sullen orange hang over the stubby peaks and tremble there. The pilot is rubbing furiously at the smears of marmalade dust dulling the chopper’s shiny panels. He is having to go over the same spot every few moments.

  ‘Abu N’af is famous for its storms,’ says the Administrator maliciously. ‘A grain of sand will bring down your fine machine.’

  ‘Not a grain, surely.’ I hunch lower in the chair, try to look like a dutiful messenger, a low-rung grunt. ‘Monsieur, you must see what is at stake here. The smuggling of priceless artefacts. Heinous traffickings. Lootings of culture by the father of the Australian woman you are sheltering.’

  Laforche smiles. ‘Usually it is the French who are considered the looters. The books taken from Danang and Hanoi. Napoleon’s foragings in Egypt and Spain.’ He examines his thumbnail and frowns. ‘You are here to arrest the woman.’

  ‘No.’ My voice is over-emphatic; above my supposed pay grade. ‘But she has information that is very important to certain people.’

  ‘And you?’

  For the first time, I am not sure what to say. ‘I won’t judge the poor woman.’

  ‘It is just a job to you.’

  I do not answer. I open the briefcase, place the envelope in front of him. His shoulders droop. He takes the money. I knew he would.

  Laforche insists on finishing his tea. To punish me. I make myself take another date. I chew it slowly. The time on my watch clicks over: another minute gone from forty-eight hours. And I’ve lost an hour in the flight from Casablanca. I try not to think of the time lost after I heard the news, time spent on my knees retching over the chipped toilet bowl recessed in the floor of the shabby bathroom in Hafid Street.

  Mitch is sure to have started the countdown from the moment he told me her whereabouts. There will be no extensions, no excuses.

  Laforche is offering me more of the local dates, unappetising papooses in a particularly malevolent yellow. I force another one down. More seconds tick over. Now he is wandering away. For God’s sake. I try not to think about Mitch and his goons coming in. Hurting her.

  I can feel the steady thud of the generator through the tiled floor. Sand is itching under my collar, my watchband. There are grains of sand under my fingernails. ‘We don’t get tea-breaks like this at the Embassy, I can tell you.’

  ‘You Americans,’ he says. ‘Always in such a hurry.’

  ‘Actually, I’m Australian.’ More seconds. Dust catches the back of my throat. I worry that grit will ruin my satellite phone. I check it on my belt, the red light is still winking. Next to the chair is my briefcase, a reassuring sentry. I swear there is more dust on the shining steel clasps than there was a moment before. I take out my handkerchief and dust its cool solidness: pure titanium, able to withstand being run over by a tank.

  Laforche is bent over the stereo system on the long mahogany sideboard. There is a clicking noise and he mutters about the generator. The watch ticks on.

  I am like a man going to the guillotine. I just want it to be over. I avert my gaze from the low window, the spackled sky, the Martian-red plain spread out behind the helicopter. The desk in front of me is almost bare: a few files, the embossed silver tea tray and teapot, a black and white photograph of a couple kissing in a very Parisian-looking café. The couple is seated in front of a mirror, in a booth, the seats covered with some dark lush material. The girl’s head is thrown back, lips parted, eyes half-closed. The man is not Laforche. I imagine a photo like that on my desk in the Hafid Street office or even in Canberra. There would be a moustache drawn on the girl, tits on the guy, within a day, within hours.

  There is glass over the photo. As I shift in my seat, I see myself reflected. I move immediately but it is too late. There is no sign of the happy, fleshy lover in Sicily; only a tall man whose cropped dark hair and designer suit and immaculately knotted silk tie can’t disguise the wary eyes and the tense jaw. The muscles chipped beyond health, the body turned wolfish. A once-sleek man teetering on the edge of gauntness, a physically strong man ravaged by darkness. By lack.

  I open the briefcase, take out my colour-coded schedule for the next three days. I have allotted three hours for the first interrogation.

  Once she knows she has been found, she would be a fool not to co-operate. Not to ask for mercy.

  Laforche has drifted over, a vinyl record in his hand. He stares at the chart with interest. He points to the few small green squares in the brick wall of red.

  ‘Leisure time,’ I say.

  He gives me a pitying look.

  I wonder what she will do when she sees me. Scream, try to run away? Or the shock will make her fall, ashen and trembling to the floor. Or she will be haughty. Maybe she will cry, ‘Thank you, thank you’. Maybe she will fling her arms around me. When I think this, I get the familiar pain beneath my ribs; acid washes through my stomach. Mitch thinks these are symptoms of the detoxification after Sicily. But I know they are not.

  The gravel purr of Edith Piaf climbs through the dry heat, wrestles with the slowly turning fan.

  Laforche says to me, ‘Chanson réaliste: all about the misery of life and love. But like Piaf, we must regret nothing.’ The song swells, filling the room like clouds.

  He glances at me. ‘But maybe you do not want a love song? Maybe this . . . ’ He changes the record. A tremulous note begins, not a flute, some kind
of pipe, and a woman’s voice, talking half in French, half in Arabic, her words grinding out to meet the eerie notes. Laforche watches me and I think of snake-charmers.

  ‘Les heures et les fois,’ he says. ‘The hours and the times.’ He begins to sing along, also in that dragging style, ‘Dans le noir, je me réveille, seul et silencieux à la page blanche du désert. In the dark, I wake, alone and silent on the white page of the desert. Dans le noir, la solitude est sainte. Solitude is holy. That is you, yes?’

  He doesn’t wait for my response. ‘When I was allowed to run the generator at night, I swear the camels would come right up to the window to listen.’ He sways in time with the song. He asks me what music I prefer.

  ‘I’m a Beethoven man myself.’ I look at my watch.

  ‘Very correct.’ He sighs. ‘It is horrible not to be allowed to play music at night in the desert. It is like being without family. Or a woman.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say indifferently. ‘I can do very well without women.’ I try not to think of the man on the surveillance tape who said, his voice breaking, Ravenous.

  Laforche raises an eyebrow.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not. But the personal and this job don’t mix.’

  He shrugs. ‘I have a wife and five children in Casablanca. But, yes, I suppose. Go on.’

  ‘Well . . . ’ I don’t know what to say next. There is danger in talking about this. ‘You don’t need it, that’s all.’

  ‘There is always une prostituée.’

  ‘I would never visit a prostitute.’

  ‘You are a romantic,’ says Laforche.

  I can’t bear it any longer. My chair scrapes as I stand.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ says Laforche. He switches the record off, comes back to the desk, opens a folder and passes across a slim pile of black and white photographs.

  The photos are of clouds of sand, piles of dust. The light has an odd intensity, making shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows, the dark grey sky flaring into white. There are strange swirls like the imprints left in water by a trailing hand. The photos look like shots of an anti-land, the negative of a positive. I think I see my own face in some of them, distorted, like a beast.

  ‘Mirages,’ says Laforche. ‘She had been photographing mirages. The nuns think she has photographed ghosts. See – don’t you think that is a man on a horse?’

  ‘Heat distortions,’ I say. ‘The combination of light and hot air distorts the natural perspectives.’

  ‘Ghosts,’ says Laforche.

  I look at my watch. I swear the glass is dusty.

  ‘Yes, well.’ My voice booms over the tiles. ‘There is nothing that can’t be explained rationally. The Bermuda triangle? Nothing but the earth spuming methane, disorienting plane sensors, overturning yachts. Giant farting, that is all.’

  I say it again, louder. ‘Giant farts.’

  I take out my notebook in its titanium cover, uncap the zero-gravity pen from NASA.

  ‘She came walking out of the desert,’ says Laforche. ‘At first she was a speck on the horizon, like a black spot in her photographs, a piece of sand.’

  ‘She came walking out of the desert,’ I say, scratching uselessly against the page, ‘because she had escaped custody.’ The pen won’t write.

  The Administrator folds his arms. ‘We are all specks in the desert. When we look so far out into the landscape, we become the landscape. The desert imprints itself on our retina, enters us.’

  I stare at him. He could be a talkative man, a lonely man. But I don’t think so. I think he is punishing me for humiliating him. This is the Arabic equivalent of a stoush behind the pub. Melee by metaphor.

  ‘I’m not here to study the desert,’ I say. ‘I’m here to do my job.’

  ‘You won’t last long,’ says the Administrator, ‘if you ignore the desert.’

  I jab at the white plain of paper. ‘You found her wandering in the dunes with no possessions, no documents?’

  He hesitates. ‘Sister Antony would know if she had anything on – on her person,’ he says delicately. ‘All I saw was the camera.’ He nods at the photos. ‘Meersun, the daughter of Betsoul, a protégée of the Sister’s, found her first.’

  I jab at the paper again. ‘So the woman was brought in and then – ’

  Laforche is still. ‘We were told that an Australian called Devlin was coming. And she placed a scorpion on her face.’

  I am ravaged beyond the pit in my stomach, the permanent pain below my heart. Beyond darkness.

  Laforche looks away. ‘She was lucky. It was an old scorpion, scarred and weary. No longer as potent.’

  The point of the pen is breaking through the paper.

  ‘This is a region,’ says Laforche slowly, ‘where the women hide daggers in their hair. The girls have poison necklaces, for times of war. Maybe that is what the woman was doing. She picked up the scorpion by one leg, how I don’t know, and she draped it around her, like a necklace.’

  I flinch but he doesn’t notice.

  ‘She said, “I’m going home”. And then the scorpion moved all over her. Who would have thought it would move so fast? It stung as it went, stabbing again and again with its devil tail. As it crawled over her eyelid, she fell slowly, like someone falling through clouds.’

  We stare at each other. This was the tipping point, as Mitch would say, with his usual trite way of reducing calamities; the moment when I should appeal to Laforche’s gallantry, his pride, whatever drove his feeling for the woman.

  I think of asking him for help. My stomach heaves. I scribble around the pockmarks in the paper and say, ‘You don’t know what she is capable of.’

  Laforche says, ‘I do not know what you are capable of.’

  The pen still won’t write.

  ‘It’s the dry air,’ says Laforche.

  ‘It’s a NASA pen,’ I say. ‘Specially designed for extreme conditions.’

  He pulls out a drawer. The knowing eye of the girl in the photograph gazes up at me.

  Laforche gives me a pencil. I sigh, acknowledge my defeat. I take the pencil and write.

  There is a small smile on the Administrator’s lips.

  The Asylum has two levels of deeply recessed arcades on all sides of a wide courtyard. The sick bay is located directly opposite the Administrator’s office. It is 11 am when we step out into the shuddering air.

  We skirt the cracked fountain in the centre of the courtyard. Its square-headed lion gapes dry-mouthed at us. Chickens scratch at tufty plants growing around the chipped base. The heat falls on me like stone. I can barely see in the searing light, even with my sunglasses on. Along the upper arcade, female patients sit between the washing hung in the stone arches. I squint and count five: thin, slack-jawed, mostly dark-skinned, with cropped hair.

  ‘We only take special cases,’ says Laforche. ‘Only what the Church sends us. So if we are not sent . . . ’ He points to a rusted iron grate in the compacted earth. ‘After the old monastery burnt down in 1408, the new one was built around the well.’ He made it sound like yesterday.

  ‘Rimbaud used to write in . . . ’ He turns, almost stepping on a chicken which was pecking at his trouser cuff. He points to the nearest stone turret, one of four, each tulip-shaped. ‘There. We have his diary.’

  I am startled. That wasn’t in my files.

  He laughs. ‘Maybe it is a forgery. For the tourism, Monsieur Devlin. In winter and autumn, we charge for visits. On Tuesdays.’

  ‘The Church doesn’t mind?’

  ‘The Church wants to spend even less. We are all thankful for the crowds who pay to visit one of the great outposts of French exploration. The diary of Rimbaud might condemn us to coach tours at Christmas but Sister Antony would say it has been our saviour.’

  He absorbs my expression. ‘You really know nothing about Rimbaud?’

  ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘They say Arthur Rimbaud never wrote poetry after the age of nineteen,’ says Laforche. ‘Imagine – the shocking, outrageous poe
ms about sex and death and madness, the revolutionary work that will begin modern poetry, it is all done between the age of sixteen and nineteen. Sixteen, Monsieur. Think of what you were doing at sixteen. Then Rimbaud goes to Brussels, the final break with Paul Verlaine, he comes to Africa, to travel and run guns. After Africa, nothing. No more poetry.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  He glances at me. ‘I do not believe it. I think, in the beginning in Africa, it was true. He was emotionally exhausted, he felt he had failed in Europe. He had wanted to be a prophet, famous among all men. A wild, reckless youth: if he said a thing, then he couldn’t take it back. But I think once he walked out of the desert, he became the seer he always wanted to be. He started writing again.’ Laforche closes his eyes for a moment. ‘He must have,’ he says, almost to himself.

  ‘Where did he walk out to, after the desert?’

  ‘Here. The first place Rimbaud came to after the desert was Abu N’af.’

  ‘Just like . . . ’

  ‘Yes. Like the woman.’

  We cross into the shade and turn into a long room with white-washed stone walls and large windows. There is a row of empty beds and a silhouette by the farthest window.

  A thin nun in a white pinafore over her black habit sits, reading, in a chair next to the last bed.

  This side of the Asylum is on the edge of the plateau, with a sheer drop to the pitted plain below. I take a good look around the room, searching for possible exits. There is only one door. At the far end are six windows fitted with wooden shutters, half of them hooked back against the outside wall. The fierce light is muted here, away from the morning sun.

  The door is behind me. There is no escape if the door is blocked.

  I straighten my tie. It is 11.05 am. Laforche, halfway across the room, looks back at me.

  I scan the room again, note the plain dresser with two hurricane lamps, both full. On the nearest wall is a faded photograph of a series of fountains falling down a steep hillside, the sun catching chips of colours in the water sprays below an iced-white chateau. People in mini-skirts and stovepipe trousers pose, smoking. I read the title: The Singing Fountains At Villa d’Este. On the far wall is another photo, of a luridly coloured oil portrait of a glum man in white robes. The current king, Mohammed VI.