“That is not satisfactory, madame.”
“Nor is your attempt to gouge me for money at a terrible moment like this.”
I walked off down the stairs to the foyer, the hefty backpack strapped across my shoulders.
When I reached the front desk, part of me wanted to make a break for it; to dash out into the now dark alleys and byways of Essaouira and run to Fouad and find my husband sitting there, his head bandaged, nursing a glass of red wine, sketching mournfully, a sad smile crossing his face; me rushing into his arms, so relieved to find him alive, willing for the next few days to push aside the terrible things that resulted in all this madness, and simply be happy that he was out of danger . . . even though another part of me seriously doubted if I could stay in this marriage much longer. But that gut feeling was overshadowed by the culpability I felt about springing that trap on him, one I knew would send him into a downward spiral. That was the worst part of all this. Had I simply confronted him, face-to-face, with the urologist’s bill, we could have yelled at each other and worked out some sort of resolution, even if it meant the end of us as a couple. But instead I took the cruel option. Leaving those documents out . . . accompanied by my note suggesting he should die . . . that was a vindictive impulse. As with most attempts at revenge, the blowback had now badly singed me.
A tap on the shoulder. The inspector was by my side.
“Okay, we can go now,” he said.
“If it turns out he isn’t there . . .”
“Then he isn’t there.”
I checked my watch. Now nearly eight thirty. Hours since he fled the room, unseen by anyone. As we walked down the back alleys toward the souk, my gaze was fixed on everyone who came toward us, who lurked in a doorway, or was slumped against a wall. Is this how the parents of a missing child must feel? The desperate horror of knowing that the center of their lives had disappeared, and hoping against hope that, by accident, he or she would suddenly stumble out in front of them, ending the nightmare from which there was absolutely no release?
It took less than ten minutes to reach Chez Fouad. The six tables on the little verandah out front were all packed. Fouad was taking an order when he caught sight of me. From the way he tensed—and then tried to quickly mask his distress—I sensed that he must know something about Paul’s whereabouts. But when the inspector approached him—flashing his badge, giving him the suspicious once-over—Fouad played dumb.
“Of course I know Monsieur Paul,” he told him. “One of my best customers. Always sits at the corner table over there. We have a collection of his drawings behind the bar.”
“And the last time you saw him here?” Moufad asked.
“When he left at four p.m.”
“You’re certain he didn’t return?” I asked.
“Madame, it is I who poses the questions,” the inspector said.
“And it’s my husband who’s missing. I also know Fouad, so—”
“When Monsieur Paul said goodbye to me at four that was the last time I saw him today,” Fouad said.
“Surely someone saw him since then,” I said.
“I’ve been on duty here since three. Had Monsieur Paul shown up again I would have seen him.”
“Could you ask any of the other waiters?”
“I am the waiter, as you well know, madame. Had he been here I would tell you.”
As he said this I glanced down and saw him rubbing his right thumb manically against his forefinger. The inspector was looking elsewhere when I caught visual manifestation of Fouad’s nervousness. When the inspector informed Fouad that he wanted to “look around the kitchen and any storage room,” Fouad told him he had carte blanche to search wherever he wanted. As soon as the inspector went inside the café, I turned to Fouad and said, “I know you know where Paul is. You need to tell me: Is he all right?”
“Can you come back later?”
“That’s going to be hard. They have a cop positioned at the door of the hotel under orders to follow me everywhere. They think I hurt Paul.”
“Find a way of getting back here before midnight.”
“Please, please let me know if my husband is okay.”
The inspector emerged from inside, asking Fouad to come with him.
“Be back before midnight,” Fouad whispered to me, then disappeared. I was momentarily free of my police escort, but knew if I vanished now it would just raise more suspicion. But how would I be able to get out of the hotel later on and find my way to the café?
There was a moment when I considered dashing off into the night, hiding somewhere for an hour, then creeping back here to learn the truth from Fouad. But as soon as I took a few steps away from the café, a uniformed police officer emerged from the shadows opposite the hotel. He saluted me, then said, “Madame, I have been instructed to ensure that you don’t leave this immediate area. So please return to your table and await the inspector.”
I had no choice but to do as ordered. When the inspector returned a few minutes later with Fouad, he told me that he had thoroughly searched the café, and there was no sign whatsoever of my husband’s presence.
“I will now have you escorted back to the hotel,” he told me. “I will be sending my men to the bus station and the taxi rank to see if he tried to leave town. We have our contacts there, so if he did board a bus or arrange a car to take him elsewhere we will know. Now you must return to the hotel.”
“And if I want to go again?”
“Then one of my men will accompany you.”
The officer who stopped me from leaving the café brought me back to Les Trois Chameaux. At the front desk, Ahmed informed me that Mira had moved all our clothes and personal effects to the new room and that M. Picard was demanding 500 dirhams now before I could be allowed to go upstairs.
I handed over the cash, telling Ahmed, “Please inform M. Picard that I consider him to be nothing less than un connard.”
I could see that Ahmed was shocked by my choice of insults and struggling not to grin in agreement. Insisting that he carry the heavy backpack upstairs, I followed him to Room 212, a tiny cell with a narrow single bed, a sink, a view of the wall in a nearby alleyway, and an elderly bathroom with peeling paint.
“Could you find me something else?”
“M. Picard told me that you have to sleep here tonight. When the boss returns tomorrow—”
“I will call him un connard to his face. Please ask Mira to bring me some mint tea.”
“Très bien, madame.”
As soon as he closed the door, I sat down on the bed, threw open the backpack, and dumped out its contents. I reached immediately for Paul’s journal. Its rear pocket revealed a shock: my husband’s passport. So he ran off without this crucial travel document. On one level this was a relief, as it indicated that he wasn’t planning to leave town or country. But, like me, Paul went nowhere in Essaouira without this important piece of documentation. Why did he dash off without it? Unless, in the anguish of discovering that I had learned his nasty little secret, he simply ran out, not knowing what to do next. Which made my sense of guilt augment tenfold.
But then another discovery in the back pocket of his journal hit me like a donkey kick. A photograph. A small three-by-five photograph of a young woman, no more than twenty-two. Moroccan, yet with certain features that hinted at someone who might be of mixed parentage. A rather beautiful young woman with jet-black hair that was a cascade of curls. Slim, perfect skin, lightly rouged lips, stylish: a tight black T-shirt and tight black jeans that managed to highlight her long-leggedness. Moroccan-French, I decided—and could easily be labeled a heartbreaker.
I stared at the photo in quiet shock for several moments. It deepened further when I turned it over and saw the inscription:
From your Samira
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
With all my love,
S xxx
She now had a name. Samira. A young woman—almost four decades his junior—who had sent a photograph of hersel
f to my husband, expressing her love for him—L’absence rend le coeur plus affectueux—and not just her love for Paul, but that being apart from him increased her yearning.
Samira. La belle Samira. Whose handwriting was highly calligraphic—as if she’d used a special italics pen to write this declaration, signing it with a little heart next to her name. I tossed the photograph onto the bed, away from me, my head reeling.
I grabbed his journal. Page after page of his tortured penmanship. With Mira arriving any moment with the tea, I didn’t have time to try to decipher them. Instead I whisked through the entire journal, looking for some sort of indicator of where this Samira might be found.
A stroke of good luck. On a page creased in half, and half decorated with sketches of . . . oh, God, this was too hard to bear . . . her face . . . I opened the fold to read, I have to find a way of getting Samira back in my life. Robin will freak—to put it mildly. But she has to know the truth sometime . . . though if she found out all the truth I would lose her forever.
So there it was: a second secret he’d been harboring for some time now. The other woman. How could I have been so naive, so guileless? How could I have fathomed so little? How did I not see this life in parallel that he was leading? And how did he meet this Moroccan beauty whom he was desperate to get back into his life?
The other woman. The stuff of cliché.
And a younger woman, who lives at 2350 rue Taha Hussein, Casablanca 4e.
No phone number. Damn. No email. I flipped open Paul’s computer. The strangest feeling hit me, unease about violating his privacy, yet another part of me simultaneously castigating myself for even allowing guilt to enter the current equation. I didn’t know Paul’s password for his computer—and it was very much locked. I tried several combinations of possible passwords—I knew that our joint bank account was robinpaultogether. That was Paul’s suggestion. Simply typing it got me tearing up again.
A knock at the door had me scrambling to put everything away, ensuring that the photograph of Paul’s beloved was slipped back into the inside pocket of his journal. When I opened the door I found Mira there, holding a tray of mint tea, looking like she wanted to be anywhere but here. I ushered her inside. As soon as I shut the door she asked in French where I would like the tea. I pointed to the chest of drawers.
“You know something, don’t you?” I asked.
She looked at me, wide-eyed, as if I had caught her in the act of theft. She shook her head several times. I saw that her eyes were awash in tears.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” I told her.
That’s when a shudder ran through her body. Reaching into the pocket of her djellaba, she pulled out a hundred-dollar bill.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I should have never taken this,” she stammered in broken English.
“Did my husband give this to you?” I asked.
More tears. “I told him I didn’t want it. But he pushed it into my hand. ‘This is what I make in two weeks!’ I told him. He just shrugged and said it was a little thank-you if he could—”
Again she broke off and seemed on the verge of breaking down.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, motioning for her to put the money back into her pocket.
“Yes I did. Because I took his money in exchange for showing him a way out of here that avoided going by the front desk.”
“Did he say why he wanted to sneak off without anyone knowing?”
“Of course not. He just said that he needed to ‘vanish without a trace’—his exact words. He gave me all this money after asking me if I knew a hidden passage out of the hotel.”
“Do you know of such a passage?”
Mira now looked even more distraught by this question. “I should never have helped him,” she said.
“Did he say he was running off?”
“All he said was, ‘Can you find a way for me to disappear without being seen by anyone . . . and can you keep a secret and not tell anyone that I left?’ ”
“Why are you telling me now, then?”
“Because you’re not ‘anyone.’ You’re his wife. He’s done something bad, hasn’t he?”
“Nothing criminal—just hurtful.”
“I let him escape.”
“All he was doing was running away from himself.”
Silence. I could see that thought taking up residence in her consciousness, and leading to more confusion.
“Did my husband say where he was going?”
She shook her head. “I insisted on bandaging his head before he left.”
“What had he done to himself?”
Pointing to the bed—and asking my permission to sit down—she positioned herself on the edge of the mattress, grasping its thin edges as if it was keeping her afloat.
“I heard a lot of noise before I came into the room. It sounded like he was throwing himself against the wall. Deliberately smashing his head. When I opened his door I saw him run towards the wall and take the entire blow against his head. The room was madness, as if it had been torn apart. When he collapsed on the ground and I started running out the door to get help, he shouted at me not to find anyone. Then he apologized for yelling, and asked if I could find a bandage for his head, again begging me not to mention all this to Ahmed or anyone else. So I ran and found a bandage and some hot water. When I got back Monsieur Paul was sitting on the bed, looking very much as if he might pass out. I cleaned up the wound. I wrapped his head in a bandage, as there was considerable blood. I told him that he had a very large lump on his forehead—already blue-black in color—and that he should really see a doctor. I worried he might have a concussion. They can be dangerous, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yes, they can be dangerous. What happened next?”
“He asked me if there was a way out of the building that would permit him to avoid passing the front desk.”
“Did he say why he wanted to sneak out the back door?”
“No.”
“I suppose he didn’t want anyone to see what he’d done to himself.”
“I wouldn’t know. He seemed very . . . unstable. I was worried that, after injuring himself, it mightn’t be a good idea for him to go out. But he said he had to see a friend.”
“Did he tell you the name of the friend?”
“The man who runs the café. He asked me again if I knew a way out the back of the hotel. When I told him I didn’t want to get into any trouble he gave me this”—reaching into the pocket of her apron she brought out the crumpled $100 bill—“I was shocked when he insisted on giving me so much money. I told him I didn’t want his money and that M. Picard would be furious with me if he discovered that I had helped him sneak away . . . especially with the state of the room. But he told me that M. Picard would get money from you to pay for it—and the one hundred dollars was a gift to me for helping him out and not saying anything. But I really can’t keep it.”
She proffered the creased portrait of Benjamin Franklin, making me wonder if Paul had a stash of American dollars he wasn’t telling me about.
“Of course you’re keeping the money. I will give you an additional three hundred dirhams if you show me the back way out of here.”
“But the police . . . they will get very angry with me . . . maybe get me into trouble . . . if they find out that I have helped you.”
“They didn’t know you helped Paul. They won’t know that you helped me. Anyway, I will be back in an hour or so. You are absolutely sure that Paul didn’t tell you where he might be going?”
She shook her head many times.
“What did he take with him?”
“Take with him? Nothing. Once I bandaged his head he stood up and said he could walk, and gave me the money. I asked him to wait in the room for several minutes, then returned when I was certain it was safe for him to go.”
“Where’s that secret way out of here? Will I be able to get back in myself?”
“Please, madame, if they catch me aiding you
—”
“I will take the blame,” I said, reaching into my pocket for the cash and thrusting it upon her.
“You and monsieur are being too generous,” she said.
No, what we are being is very American, I thought. Thinking that money can buy our way out anything. Mira looked at the cash. A week’s wages for opening a door. I could see her hesitating.
“I will come back in twenty minutes,” she finally said. “Ahmed is on a break right now, and he often goes out the back for a cigarette. When he returns on duty to the front desk I will come for you. We won’t have much in the way of time, because he could call for me. But as long as you are ready when I return . . .”
“I’ll be ready,” I said.
Mira nodded and left. I went over and poured out a glass of Moroccan whisky. The mint tea not a balm tonight. I quickly repacked the backpack with things I didn’t want left behind in the room: my laptop, my passport and journal, Paul’s diary. I recounted all the remaining cash that had been kept in the mug on the desk in our other room. There was close to 8,000 dirhams—around one thousand dollars. My great hope was that, once I got over to Chez Fouad, I would find Paul, hiding in some corner of the café that Inspector Moufad hadn’t discovered. With some coaxing and kindness (and me pushing aside my considerably maimed pride for a day or so), I could get us back to the States and Paul into the hands of a good shrink—who would help him negotiate the aftermath of my leaving him.
I finished the mint tea. I resisted the temptation to look further through Paul’s diary. I tried to control the hurt and anxiety coursing through me. A light knock on the door. I opened it. Mira put her finger to her lips and motioned for me to follow her. I hoisted the backpack. We both scanned the corridor. It was clear. We crept along like cats. At the end of the hallway was a small door. I had to take off my backpack to follow Mira and squeeze through it. There was a narrow stairway, the steps crumbling, the walls here reeking of damp. Down and down we went, entering some subterranean warren. We reached another door. Opening it the stench of sewage hit my nostrils. It was vile, overpowering. Reaching into her apron pocket Mira brought out a candle and a disposable lighter. Holding a flame to the wick she whispered:
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