Zahrah raised her head. ‘Let them. They won’t find Ale. And since Dar Portuna now belongs to me, they’ll have to leave well enough alone, eventually.’ She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘So are you coming? Or do you want to sleep on the streets? I have to tell you, I don’t think you’d last a minute.’
He didn’t know what to say. Despite his guilt and shame and uncertainty, a kind of thrill rose in his chest at being allowed to stay at Dar Portuna; even if it was for what might be his final few nights in Tangier.
‘Thank you,’ he said, hoping she knew how much he meant it.
She just nodded and stepped towards the door.
‘Wait.’
Hurriedly, he shuffled together the scrappy, mismatched papers on the bedside table.
‘Is that …?’
‘My book. Yeah.’ He shook his head. ‘If I hadn’t been so obsessed with my own damn writing, none of this would have happened.’ His fingers tightened on the old paper, on the new sheets. ‘I should burn these,’ he said. ‘It’s not my story. I’ve already caused enough trouble—’
Zahrah took hold of one side of the manuscript. ‘Don’t you dare. Ale told you this story for a reason. And anyway –’ she gave him a half-smile ‘– I might want to read it.’
With the duffel bag over his shoulder, the manuscript carefully wedged within, he made a penitent farewell to Madame Sarah and received a ferocious, thoroughly undeserved hug about the knees from Aziz. Then, they were out on the street, bustling hot at noon.
They didn’t speak, just walked rapidly uphill, towards Dar Portuna, towards the rest of the story. After checking to see if anyone might be lurking, spying on the place, they brushed the jasmine aside, and slipped in through the old gate. In bright sunlight, the house seemed more unreal than ever, as though at any minute it might flicker and disappear from the surface of the world. They stepped through the front doors, into the faded, echoing hallway.
‘It feels so strange without Ale,’ Zahrah whispered. When her fingers brushed his, he took her hand, squeezing it tight.
Together, they walked slowly through the entrance hall, towards the quiet, dust-filled rooms. Sam peered up the stairs as they passed, his skin prickling all over. He almost expected to hear footsteps, to see a young Alejandro come running down, hear the warble of a gramophone and Hilde calling out from the veranda, to see Langham look up from the desk as they stepped into the study.
‘This is where I found the envelopes,’ Zahrah said.
There was a strange smell in the room. Something sharp, at odds with the old leather and worm-eaten wood. Smoke, Sam realized; smoke and burned paper. In the grate, a huge pile of ash had been pushed to one side. Dropping his bag, he knelt and picked out a fragment of dull green cardboard that might have belonged to a file.
‘Ale spent all night in here.’ Zahrah was standing over him. ‘All the drawers and ledgers are empty. Everything was burned, I think, except for what she left me. And what she left you.’
Reaching into his bag, he pulled out the envelope with his name on, and shook out the pages. The rest of Ale’s story, unfinished. He sank into the creaking armchair, déjà vu shimmering across his mind.
‘Go on,’ Zahrah said. ‘Read it.’
Blinking hard, he turned the pages until he found where they’d left off.
‘“Old—”’ he began and stopped.
‘What is it?’
‘“Old Pal”,’ he said, disbelieving. ‘“Take a pony of Canadian whisky, a pony of Campari and a pony of French vermouth” … for god’s sake.’
Zahrah laughed, though her eyes were bright with tears. ‘That’s so like Ale,’ she said. ‘What does the rest say?’
He had to clear his throat before continuing. ‘“Stir into a cocktail glass and drink to friends, absent, old and new.”’
Zahrah wiped at her face. ‘I think we had better do as we’re told.’
Together, they hunted through the dozens of bottles on the bar, some of which looked decades old, perhaps even from Langham’s day, their labels torn, containing nothing but sticky residue.
Sam found himself glancing over at Zahrah. What was he doing here? A few hours before he’d been slammed in a cell, and now here he was, in a decaying villa, making drinks with a woman who … He looked down rapidly at the bottles.
Don’t go there. You have to go home.
Finally, they had two glasses of liquor before them, glowing in the afternoon sun.
‘To friends,’ Zahrah said. ‘Absent, old and new.’
They touched glasses, and drank. It was incredibly strong.
‘Ready?’ Zahrah asked, glancing at the pages.
He swallowed down the taste of the past, of what might be his last drink in Tangier.
‘Ready.’
Old Pal
Take a pony of Canadian whisky, a pony of Campari and a pony of French vermouth. Stir into a cocktail glass and drink to friends, absent, old and new.
I have cared for many people in my life, whether I have wanted to or not. That’s the trick of friendship. You can lock your doors, board up your gate, and still, some soul will find a way in, slipping through your shutters, creeping over your walls, tripping and falling face first into your life and there is nothing you can do to stop it.
I class you as a friend, Samuel, though a new one. Zahrah too, now more like family to me. Both of you came uninvited, trespassers into my life. But I am glad of it. Once, I was the person who climbed the wall. I was the one who crashed into a life unasked for. Should I have been surprised then, by what Langham did to me? Perhaps not.
But at the time … I felt as if someone had reached into my chest and ripped the insides from me, guts and heart and all. I was wretched. I was terrified. And most of all, I was furious with myself.
At the inn, I’d watched people deceive themselves over and over; the girls, the clients, Elena, even Morales. I had thought I was above it all. But of course, I was not. I had spun myself falsehoods out of jasmine and smoke, bound my hands with white flannel and silk and stepped smiling into a trap of my own making.
Langham had shown me over and again what he was – traitor, liar, charlatan – and I had chosen not to see it. I wouldn’t wish that on you, he had told me, when I said I wanted to be like him. But I hadn’t listened, and as a result I found myself in danger, facing what could have been the Spanish police, extradition, and the end.
Could have been, but wasn’t. I avoided that fate not through luck or cunning or trickery, but through friendship.
As ignorant as the British police were, it did not take them long to realize their mistake. I still remember their pink faces, pale beneath their sunburn when I told them for the last time that I was not Langham and finally proved it. If I hadn’t been so frightened, I would have laughed.
They were incensed by their mistake, and declared that, whoever I was, I must be involved with Langham’s criminal activities, seeing as I was dressed like him and carrying his papers, his pocket watch, his writing case. I had to think faster than I ever had before.
It wasn’t hard to make myself cry – for I was terrified – and through the tears I told them that I worked in Langham’s house as a cook and that it was his particular perversion to have me dress up in his clothes. The passport I couldn’t explain. I supposed, between sobs, that he must have left it in his jacket. Eventually, they came to the obvious, and correct, conclusion: Langham had used his silly, trusting domestic as a decoy, in order to secure his escape from Tangiers.
By this point, the clock on the police station wall read a quarter past five. Langham had won himself over three hours’ head-start. More than enough for a man like him. The police knew it, and they vented their frustration on me. They grilled me for hours. What had Langham done in the days prior? Who did he talk to? Who visited the house? Again and again, I pleaded ignorance. I was just the cook, a poor girl Langham had taken a fancy to, who he liked to see dressed up in men’s clothes. I didn’t know about his business, I was always in the kitchen.
I knew they were getting desperate when they asked me about Cabrera.
You won’t see him again, I almost said. But I didn’t. Instead, I gambled that Cabrera had kept the information about me to himself, for future use. I told the police that a man of that name had once come to dinner, that was all.
I told them my name was Alejandra del Potro, praying they wouldn’t check it with the consulate. I’m just a poor silly girl, I tried to make my demeanour cry, taken in by her corrupt employer. Of course, they wanted my papers; they wanted proof of who I was. My story would have unravelled then, and I would have found myself headed for a Spanish jail and the garrotte, had it not been for the cool, familiar voice that rang out beyond the cell door.
Hilde. It was Hilde. And though I could hear the panic in her voice, she was strong enough and smart enough to hide it from them. In icy British tones, I heard her complain of the police tramping through her bedroom all night. I heard her declare that she had no notion of where Mr Langham might be – though she was sure he would return in a day or two – and that in the meantime, she would like her cook released, since she, Lady de Luca Bailey, couldn’t so much as boil an egg on her own.
She vouched for my story. She dismissed their charges of impersonation and immorality with a haughty laugh and a casual reference to her solicitor. She paid the desk clerk to discharge me, took me by the arm and swept me from the station towards Langham’s car, which stood, gleaming in the first light of day.
Only when we pulled away from the station did I see how much her hands were shaking, how she had started to cry, every breath turning into a sob.
‘My god,’ she said as she raced through the deserted streets, half-blinded by tears. ‘My god, Alejandro, what has he done?’
I couldn’t answer, slumped in the passenger seat in my beautiful, crumpled suit. In that moment, it was too much. I had envied Langham his wealth and freedom; I had wished for all the things he had, everything that been denied me as a poor woman without family or name. And now here I was, sitting in the front seat of an expensive motorcar, being driven around by a Lady in an evening gown. I almost let out a bitter laugh. As twisted as it was, I had been granted my wish.
Dar Portuna had been ransacked. No one had cleaned up after the party, and the tiled floors were scuffed with boot prints, with spilled drinks.
‘Bouzid?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.
Hilde shook her head. Like Langham, he had vanished.
‘The police came through,’ she told me as she looked around, her make-up smudged from crying. ‘They took everything they could find from the study, all of Arthur’s papers. Except …’
I followed her to her bedroom, where she pulled open the bottom dresser drawer. There, hidden in the lining, beneath a layer of sanitary napkins and knickers and stockings, she revealed a dozen green cardboard files, stashed alongside her own, secret Italian ones.
‘I wagered they’d be too squeamish to look closely at a lady’s necessities,’ she said, with a bleak smile. ‘I don’t know what else they got, but I think these are the most important. As soon as I heard hammering at the gate, I knew something had gone wrong. I went and snatched these up from the study, just in case.’ She sank on to the edge of the bed. ‘I was so frightened. I hoped both of you might have got away, but then the police told me that they had arrested you, in place of him and I …’ She trailed off, tears on her face.
Clumsily, I pulled out a file. It was filled with papers written in French. There was another entirely in German. I saw addresses in Marseille and Tripoli, Cape Town, and Trieste, shipping manifests and pages of drawings, like Hilde’s prototypes, photographs of buildings and people who stared darkly from the paper, lists of names written beneath them. Whatever the documents were, I had no doubt that in connection to Langham, they were incriminating.
‘Maybe he thought they’d let me go, once they realized their mistake.’ My voice sounded hollow. I didn’t have it in me to believe my own excuses any more.
Hilde sniffed, and pushed back her hair. ‘Even if that’s true, he knew what you were running from. He knew all it would take was for the British police to liaise with the Spanish, and then …’ She looked at me. ‘I’m so sorry, Alejandro. I never dreamed.’
I went to her, and we held each other tight, until our tears subsided and we were able to turn our burning eyes to the mess before us.
The days that followed were terrible. We leapt every time the telephone rang; we broke into cold sweats when a fist hammered on the gate. Police came at any hour of the day, not just the British, but gendarmes, guardia, polizei, even. It was clear that Langham’s activities stretched far, far further than any of us had imagined.
Cabrera had thought of Langham as an easy catch; he obviously had no idea what kind of person he was dealing with.
Then came the news of Langham’s boat, abandoned on the strait, and a call from the station, a few hours later, to say that a body had been recovered. Hilde was the one to identify it. She came back shaken and pale, but strangely excited.
The corpse was almost unrecognizable, she said, battered by the rocks. Most of the hair was gone, as well as the eyes. But it was wearing the remains of Langham’s clothes, the white flannel suit, the saffron shirt, torn and spoiled, his gold ring, which for some reason was jammed above the knuckle, as if the fingers had swelled.
Neither of us said what we were thinking: that it didn’t matter at all whether the body was Langham’s or that of a man with yellow, goat-like eyes. In that moment, we made a silent pact to keep it a secret, to never mention his name to anyone. Even if somewhere in the world, someone was walking around wearing his face, the man we had known as Arthur Langham – the man we had loved – was dead to us. Our silence would ensure he stayed that way.
Langham had been clever in some ways, and rather stupid in others. He had left Hilde in charge of Dar Portuna, counting on her loyalty, perhaps intending to reclaim it from her one day, when the British had moved on to other targets, and her anger had faded enough to forgive him. A mistake. The very day Hilde returned from the coroner’s office, we set about securing our future. We made a good team, Lady Bailey and I; she beyond reproach with her title and fine manners, me with my knowledge of the streets and petty scams.
It didn’t take us long to hack out a will on Langham’s typewriter, even less time for me to dress up in one of his suits and find some poor backstreet notaire half-blind with opium withdrawal to witness the document, no questions asked. If he noticed that the will was dated June, rather than July, he didn’t say a word, just took the generous fee and shook my hand and murmured, Merci, Monsieur Langham.
A week later the formalities were concluded. Lady Hilde Bailey became the legal owner of Dar Portuna. Immediately, without a second thought, she had a new deed drawn up, and gave half of the house to me. We both knew then that, whatever happened, we would always have a place of safety and sanctuary. A home.
I had never had a true friend, apart from Ifrahim. That is what Hilde became, the closest and dearest person to me. And if Tangiers society whispered about us, so what? We could close the doors of Dar Portuna and let jasmine grow over the gate and not bother with them in the least, until the world had moved on, and forgotten both of our names.
Two months became six, and the phone calls from the police stopped. Six months became a year and mutterings of a financial crash began to reach us. A year became two, and Italy was hit hard and Hilde’s extortion of her ex-husband was no longer viable. So, we found new ways to live, using some of Langham’s old contacts. Tangiers has always been a flexible city, and in times of economic depression, other markets tend to thrive …
When you arrived at my house, Sam, I could have told you that story. It’s a tale of how an Englishwoman and a Spanish orphan made their fortunes on the tip of Africa. I could have told you how they made friends and lovers and enemies. How they built up an empire of their own, one to rival Langham’s, by employing people they trusted: wom
en like them, who wanted to live by their own terms, secretaries and cooks and captains with gold teeth, who knew when to keep their silence …
It’s a story of how those women evaded capture by being smart and fast and quiet, taking new names when they needed them, disappearing into their secret haven – known only to a few close friends – whenever they sensed they were in danger. For many years, until she died, that Englishwoman and I lived and loved and cultivated the one thing both of us wanted more than anything else: freedom.
All stories must come to an end. Hilde is gone, Zahrah has learned all I can share, and it seems the authorities might have found my doorstep at last. And so I find myself wondering whether Dar Portuna has become a cage, rather than a haven; whether freedom might better be found out in the world. Whether, by breaking my silence about Langham, I might finally be able to shake off the past, and begin a new story, even at my age.
The thought is irresistible.
But, I didn’t tell you that story. I’m telling you this one, and it is almost finished. Hold out your glass and I will pour the very last drop.
It tastes of a foggy morning in March 1932, when a letter arrived at the gate of Dar Portuna, postmarked Shanghai. For long minutes it sat damp with rain on the kitchen table, while Hilde and I stared, trying to decide what to do. Then, as the coffee pot began to whistle, we met each other’s eyes, picked it up, and dropped it into the stove. For a moment, the whole kitchen seemed to smell of wax and musk and rose-scented pomade.
Not for long. By the time it had crumpled to ash we were sat on the veranda, talking and drinking coffee and listening to the rain, falling over the strait of Tangiers.
Epilogue
Tangier 1988
Last Word
Take a pony of dry gin, three quarters of a pony of Chartreuse Verte, three quarters of a pony of Maraschino liqueur and the same of fresh lime. Shake well with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. A drink to cleanse the palate, when the day is done.
An Echo of Scandal Page 29