Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  “After all, virginity is easily determined,” said Dr. Kadimi. “Or, at least, approximately determined. Our young men would I think be shocked to know of the possible physical ambiguities. We in the medical profession tend to tactfully glide over them.”

  Neil and Ian didn’t seem interested in this detail and went on discussing the probable character of the brother. Ian went to telephone the Al‐Sayads and warn Suma. I wondered if he’d speak to Gazi and what they would say.

  “It’s incredible,” Posy kept saying, “someone ratted her out, as you Americans say.”

  But I was in a state of extreme shock, because I thought I had seen the logo on his gym bag: Olympic rings, and I thought it had said MUNICH 1972. I couldn’t be sure; it was no more than the afterimage of something glimpsed and only interpreted later.

  25

  Regardless of what the legal constraints are, you should not delude yourselves that a reduction of legal constraints or even a total elimination of them will relieve you of a considerable burden… the difficult burden of deciding for yourselves what the restrictions upon your actions should be if you don’t want them imposed from outside.

  —Antonin Scalia, “Discussion of Legal Constraints and Incentives”

  Suma received the information of her brother’s presence phlegmatically, according to Ian, who was delegated to phone her right away.

  “She said, ‘He isn’t a bad person, he is doing the will of my father.’ ” The Al‐Sayads agreed to keep her inside for a few days, or at least not send her on errands to visible public places. It would be up to Suma to decide whether to contact Amid. He had learned about the Cotters from Suma herself. “Of course I had to write to them,” she said. “How else could I go back? I have to reassure them I am not bad, and they will let me alone. My school will be starting in two months.” It was clear that in her mind, her Moroccan life was simply temporary, though in the mind of her rescuers it was meant as a permanent solution. The idea that she would make a new life here hadn’t occurred to her for one minute.

  The next morning, Posy and I walked over to the Al‐Sayad compound, rather furtively, with a great sense of being followed, though it was bare, open desert between our two places, where anyone spying on us would be visible, and there was no sign of Amid. Of course my thoughts turned to the tableau of yesterday, Gazi’s lunch with Ian— I had thought of nothing else, really, Amid notwithstanding, but by now I had rationalized my dismay into a belief that Gazi’s familiar touch to her lips and Ian’s palm meant something more like “my lips are sealed,” over a banal secret, like a birthday surprise.

  From the outside, Gazi’s palace was like Ian’s, with walls of the same color of ocher and the same waving bougainvillea, here an intense orange. A guard dozing—all guards seemed to doze here—leapt up and escorted us through the gates, without inquiring who we might be, though we explained profusely that we’d come to see Suma.

  Inside the gates, we were amazed to see a large swimming pool. We’d thought, because Suma brought the Al‐Sayad children to Ian’s to swim, that there wasn’t one at home. The house was sumptuous in the Mediterranean style of other Moroccan riads, all arched doorways and thick-walled passages. Gazi and Khaled were nowhere to be seen, but a maid went off to get Suma. We waited in the wide hall, open to the sky. Suma came from what appeared to be an office, and we told her in more detail about Amid.

  “Someone is bound to tell him where you are,” I said. “My poor brother.”

  “Is he here to kill you?”

  “Je ne sais pas. Maybe he still would,” she decided.

  “He has no idea where you are unless you give him the address. You are safe at the Al‐Sayads’, but Ian thinks you ought to go someplace like Essaouira for a while anyhow. Sir Neil will organize it.” This was the message we had to deliver to persuade her to go. We didn’t ask ourselves what the Al‐Sayads’ attitude to Suma’s family drama would be. Obviously they wouldn’t want her to be murdered, but in retrospect my hesitation about ascribing even that concern to them testified to my (and Posy’s, for we talked about it) uncertainty and mistrust of Islam, or misunderstanding at least.

  “You never know how they’ll take things. Think of the Danish cartoons,” Posy said.

  Suma sat in one of the deep-cushioned white chairs, apparently ambivalent. We hovered over her like anxious carrion eaters.

  “I think I am safe here. But I would like to see him. Maybe I could meet him somewhere, some public place. If I could talk to him, I think I could decide how his heart is now.”

  But we were all apprehensive. People working for Ian—Miryam and the other maids—knew full well where Suma was, if he thought of asking them. He certainly would ask the help at Neil and Marina’s. He might bribe them or appeal to their religion. Did he know who we were or where we lived? How had he found the Cotters? We knew the answers to none of these questions except that Suma had written her parents.

  “Should we tell our staff he might be asking after Suma?” I wondered.

  “No reason he should, but it might be a good idea,” Ian said, looking at Posy to do it, recognizing that her rapport with them was better than mine. Of course, he could have done it himself. Anyhow, the maids were instructed. We had the comfortably protected feeling of circling the wagons. A day passed.

  Sometime overnight the next night, “Sheila” sent an e‐mail, which I read in the morning, asking me to phone on a secure line as soon as possible, which meant going to the Mamounia for a public landline. It was probable that the Moroccan police monitored these public phones, but this was still safer than cells because they couldn’t know who was calling. I asked Rashid to take me to the hotel at about ten a.m., unusually early, but the hour couldn’t be helped. In the interests of appearing normal, I asked Posy to come along, but she refused, apologizing that she was a slow morning starter.

  Walking to the car, I still found myself looking around for Suma’s brother lurking somewhere, not that he’d have any idea where we lived, let alone where to find her, unless she had told him. Still, I couldn’t lose the idea that he could have followed us, could be hiding behind a bush or giant cactus, or outside the walls. It even crossed my mind to wonder whether the brother, Amid, could actually be staying at the Mamounia. I didn’t think it likely, but once, shortly after 9/11, I thought I saw Osama bin Laden at the Dorchester in London, tall, shaven, wearing a suit.

  While Rashid was parking, I went into the hotel and directly to the phone corridor. What Taft had to say surprised me: He and two others would be coming to Marrakech later that day! I should get them three rooms at the Sheraton Hotel and rent a closed van. He’d tell me the rest when he got there, that afternoon. “It’s an endgame of sorts,” he said.

  Hard to explain the complex rush of emotions—relief that suddenly here was something to do; simultaneous perception of the difficulties of, for instance, keeping from Ian, via Rashid, news of my renting a van. The hotel assignment was fairly easy, since the Sheraton was quite near the Mamounia. I could walk to it, had been there before for drinks. In a way, I liked it better than the Mamounia; it was more Moroccan-looking, with its mosaics and carved ceiling. Was it like Taft to have a refined and subtle set of hotel priorities?

  I explained at the front desk about my visiting relatives, booked three rooms, gave them my credit card. In the lobby was an enormous Christmas tree. People were coming to Morocco for the holidays, there was nothing surprising about Santas and Christmas trees everywhere, and the crèches, Mary in her veil, the magi in their Moroccan robes and turbans—to them it must have looked a completely modern, normal tableau, Middle Eastern costume having changed very little from Jesus’s time.

  The rental car places were not far, so I sent Rashid home with instructions to come back for me at the end of the afternoon, and hailed a mini-taxi to take me to Avis, on Avenue Mohammed V. I was excited. This was the first truly clandestine action I had undertaken, though it was scarcely secret, standing in the Sheraton lobby with my credit
card.

  My fears that a woman couldn’t rent a car in Morocco proved unfounded, though they reveal the depth to which I had internalized the Islamic strictures against women. At first there was some difficulty getting a closed van and some hesitation in my story about it, though I found that explanations came glibly after the first instant of blank panic. It had to be a closed van, I said, because that’s what I’d been told to get; an employee, especially a female employee, doesn’t ask for reasons. I wanted a closed van, not a pickup or an SUV, because those were my orders. Avis had pickups and station wagons, four-wheel SUVs—almost everything but a closed van. In the end, I got one from Europcar and drove it back to the Sheraton, crawling along carefully among the donkeys and people and ominously dented cars.

  My supposition was that Taft and whomever he brought with him (“we”) were going to smuggle something or someone in or out, possibly kidnap someone. I wondered if other people performing their first professional act in a new place might feel the same sense of fraudulence and imminent exposure. I was two people, the one calmly transacting a car rental, the other watching the first with wonderment and dismay to think she had put her hand (or foot) in an actual, possibly dangerous, activity with political and legal implications that could land her in a Moroccan jail. And moreover that this was my job.

  All of it done, I had some time to consider what was actually happening. Can I truly say that I guessed there was a connection to Suma’s brother? Perhaps the conjunction of his arrival and Taft’s program suggested it, but with hindsight, I don’t think I knew. It became clear soon enough. To be honest, my main thoughts were how to conceal the movements of my day from Ian, how to reappear at dinnertime with a plausible explanation for how I had spent the hours, although now that I was busy setting up the library, I was often out all day. I called Posy to say I was going over to the Tea Cosy, and did she want to join me? To my relief, she said no. Then I went to the Tea Cosy with a bag of books, my cell phone on silent vibration, to wait for Taft and to establish a presence for myself, drinking tea and pasting checkout registers inside the books for the library next door. At about four I went back to the hotel, got the room key, and went up to wait.

  I remembered from training that the thing said to be one of the hardest among things you might have to do was waiting. There are mental techniques for getting through it—reviewing codes and ciphers, poetry, verb forms in other languages. Of course, as I waited, I thought about Ian, and other affairs I’d had. I admit that it crossed my mind that if I were married to Ian, I could either give up this job or at least reveal to him what I was up to, and that of those two choices, maybe giving up would be the better course, to enjoy freedom from secrecy. In other words, I daydreamed about getting married, like millions of other women.

  At the same time I was really loving the idea that at last I was part of an action. A person doing a new job hopes to do it well, naturally enough, but I found myself excessively on edge, terribly anxious not to fail, anxious to please. I had always had a sense of my unimportance to Taft, and the whole organization, and the great scheme of things—truly I was hardly above a picket—but this was now intensely combined with a wish that it not be the case. What they had asked of me was simple enough—rent a room, rent a car; why on earth should I feel uncertain that I had done it right? But I kept reviewing every step of my recent actions, checking for mistakes. Taft’s need for a van raised an infinitude of possibilities—contraband, smuggling, transporting things or people, escapes. I’d find out soon enough, but in some way I was hoping for the darkest of possibilities.

  And I kept coming back to Ian and Gazi. One good thing about having a new identity is that it becomes real and allows you to forget, to a certain extent, the mistakes of your former life, your birth life, left behind like a shed skin, allowing you to become a wiser, calmer, more amusing you. I did think from time to time of the man I’d been in love with in Paris, but it was mostly to test my feelings for Ian, to see if they were as strong, and till now I would have said they were not quite as, or were tempered by wisdom, the way, people say, the second time under fire you aren’t as scared as the first time someone shoots at you. The anguish of love had not been as strong, but now this new pang of jealousy made me as miserable as I had been before.

  As I sat there, I also thought over the affair of Suma’s brother, who seemed a forthright, rather French young man, and about what he had said about her having had, possibly, a sexual experience that had panicked her. I thought again about the abiding problems of belief. Did Suma believe, for example, that she was worth half of what a man is worth? I did see that she probably believed her value was intrinsically bound up with her virginity, and that if indeed something had happened, it could have been devastating to her interior composure, in what ever realm of cultural conflict she was obliged to live in, in Paris and here.

  26

  Secret Counsels are only inspired by Satan, / In order that he may cause grief to the Believers.

  —Koran 58:10

  At four fourteen, Taft rang my cell phone. They had landed, were at the airport, and were on their way to the hotel. What name was the room under? (Mine.) In another twenty minutes, Taft and two other men knocked at the door. Taft shook my hand and briefly presented the other men: Walt Snyder and Tarik Dom, both American, Snyder black, Tarik some kind of Indonesian-looking person, both tall and well‐tailored. They briefly acknowledged me, checked the room, and flung open the door to the balcony to let in the outside air, and of course to make sure that no one lurked on it. The room overlooked the garden and the drinks patio. A multicultural, harmonious murmur of talk rose up from the people below. All three of my visitors were taciturn and made no attempt to explain what we were up to—I soon saw that was because they were reluctant to talk in front of me, as if I were the secretary or the local hooker hired for the setup and not a colleague at all. I was always surprised to encounter some evidence of dismissive machism—at home growing up, my parents treated my brother just as they treated my sister and me. I persisted in my wish to know what we were doing.

  “We have a subject. He’s in town. When we find out where, we watch him for a few days while we settle whether the Moroccans are willing to interrogate him, and if not, the Egyptians will. We want to see who his contacts are.”

  “You don’t know in advance whether the Moroccans will help you?” Us, I meant.

  “Don’t want to ask until we have the capability to pick him up right away, in case they tip him off. We aren’t sure of them here.” No discussing it with Colonel Barka, then.

  “What should I do next?” I asked.

  “The subject is a French Algerian who got into town yesterday, ostensibly looking for his sister. He’ll have to contact an English man, Cotter. The sister is a young woman you know, initially placed with the Cotters. I gather she’s moved. We’ll find out where he’s staying; it shouldn’t be hard. We want to see who else he contacts, what the local scene is.”

  “Well, yes, we’ve met him already.” I was stunned by this coincidence, if that’s what it was. Though I had mentioned Suma from time to time as a kind of window dressing to my reports, I had thought of her as of no particular interest to Taft’s inquiries, a separate subplot, nothing to do with his world. I didn’t think to ask the questions that came to me soon after, such as: Did Suma know that her brother was mixed up in something illicit and was the object of surveillance? And, of course, I wondered what the “subject” was mixed up in—presumably terrorism and its related components of support: the money laundering, and arming and running its agents. Suma had figured into my reports, but I also couldn’t remember if I had told Taft about her moving to the Al‐Sayads’. I hadn’t realized he was interested in her. Now he said, “Tell me more about Suma.” He found her story interesting but didn’t explain why. Of course, her story was interesting; anyone would think so. I told Taft I needed to know more, about everything.

  “For instance, Amid. Is he a bad guy? Why do we want him?
Did you know about the situation with his sister? Is it coincidence? I need more information here.”

  “You have the information you need. Knowing too much can compromise your role.”

  “Ian’s involved, isn’t he? Is that it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s your role, finding out.”

  I could imagine a scenario in which everyone was into something. Ian and Gazi, even Habiba. How coincidental was it that I met her? That Tom and Strand knew her? And Tom and Strand? So well-placed to keep tabs on their foreign customers, fingers right on the pulse. Suma and the Cotters? Posy was the only one I couldn’t invent a spy scenario for.

  It had been made clear to me that a spy in my position was not to evaluate the reports of her pickets, only to pass them along for her betters to study, and from that position I had passed along some reports, especially—odd to say—from Habiba, but other things as well, that I had doubted. Of course I’d mentioned my doubts—let others decide—but to myself I did wonder about whether these were errors of understanding on Habiba’s part, or deliberate disinformation, and if the latter, disinformation generated by whom? I remembered her years in Mecca and knew she was no longer married to her fellow American convert but to an actual Moroccan, though I’d never met him. I saw I should have found out more about him. Maybe he was a fanatic, one of them.

  Many of the things she reported responded to my questions about charitable giving, and some concerned the situation in the Western Sahara, where Morocco and Spain both had interests now challenged by Algeria; it was home to half a million or more refugees and strays, in camps run by the U.N. This had struck me, because Ian was interested in the situation there, involved because of Rashid’s family. He had mentioned it at dinners, in the general political talk. For all I knew, Habiba’s husband was a Western Sahara activist or a member of the GSPC, who were a sort of North African Al-Qaida who were said to be growing. And Amid could belong to one of these groups.…