The Blue Hour

by Douglas Kennedy

“Get going where?”

  “To find Paul. You know where he’s gone, don’t you?”

  “Go have a shower. I will have Omar make some tea, and then we will discuss your husband and his whereabouts.”

  “I left Essaouira in a hurry yesterday when I learned that Paul had come to Casablanca. So I have nothing to change into, and nothing with which to brush my teeth.”

  “I could supply you with a toothbrush, but I sense we are in two different worlds when it comes to size or taste. However, there is a big French clothing store just five minutes’ walk from here. Omar would be happy to guide you.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. “Could I use a phone, please?”

  “Are you wanting to call Royal Air Maroc?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’ve taken care of that for you.”

  “You what?”

  “When you passed out I tried waking you many times. When you wouldn’t arise I took the liberty of going into your bag and finding your travel documents and the printout of your airline ticket. I saw it was for midday today. Given your exhaustion I knew you simply wouldn’t be making the flight. So I called a friend who runs everything at Royal Air Maroc. You are booked on the same flight at midday tomorrow. May I now extend the invitation for you to take advantage of our guest bed tonight and allow me to take you out for dinner?”

  I was completely dumbfounded.

  “Now, if you will give us ten minutes to wash and dress . . .” Ben Hassan said.

  Still in shock, I simply nodded and headed down the corridor. In the closet near the front door there, indeed, was my bag. My passport was in place. So too my computer. And my wallet with assorted credit cards. And a fresh printout of the changed airplane ticket with the old ticket stapled behind it. The new ticket also reflected the fact that the flight change had been made without cost to me.

  I reproached myself for assuming that my host and his assistant-lover had robbed me. I was having that knee-jerk Western reaction to things North African; a belief that, with few exceptions, no one here was to be trusted. But if the past few weeks had proven anything, it was that, outside of a few hassled moments, I had been treated with considerable respect and propriety. And Monsieur Ben Hassan, rather than turning me away from his door, took me in, allowed me to pass out and sleep unencumbered for many hours, changed my ticket to the following day, and was now offering me the chance to stay here tonight. I owed him thanks for that, although I couldn’t help but be a little suspicious about his going through my bag just to see if I had an airplane ticket in need of changing. Was there some hidden motive there? The man was up to something in what I presumed was the false passports industry. And I wondered what he might have on Paul in the way of information that my husband might not want shared with others. Then there was the way that, like a ruthlessly cool bridge player, he trumped me with that little bombshell: “He’s gone to see his wife,” a revelation that landed like a kick to the head.

  Still, I couldn’t fault his hospitality, while I could certainly fault my hyperanxiety and paranoia for coming across as wildly suspicious and distrustful. I returned to the living room and began making up the bed.

  “There is no need to assuage your guilt by tidying up.”

  I turned around and saw that he was in a white djellaba, already marked with sweat, as the ceiling fans did little to temper the heat of the late afternoon.

  “But I do feel guilty—especially for the way I immediately assumed . . .”

  “We all have our prejudices—even when we tell ourselves that we are not prejudiced.”

  “I apologize.”

  “Ego te absolvo,” he said with a smile.

  I smiled back. “You’re Catholic?”

  “My mother was. My father kicked with the Muslim foot. Moi . . . I am somewhere in between. But the Catholic in me likes the instant redemption of confession. There is no need to be apologetic about before. You will join me for dinner tonight?”

  “That is most generous of you. But I need to find clothes first. I left Essaouira with nothing at all.”

  “Being on the run from the police usually means exigent departures.”

  “How did you know I was running away from the cops?”

  “I have my sources. But fear not, none of them know you are here. I am complètement discret. But bravo for eluding them the way you did. Of course they think that you beat up Paul with some heavy object. Perhaps he deserved your wrath. A brilliantly talented man, Paul. One of the most gifted artists I’ve yet to encounter, yet someone who cannot face any sort of grounded reality. Instead of simply saying what he does not want, he plays the game of agreeing to something that he knows he cannot follow through on, thus creating an entire substructure of lies as an exit strategy.”

  I looked at Monsieur Ben Hassan with even greater respect. Never before had I heard someone nail Paul’s manifold psychological complexities. Of course, when you are in the midst of a crisis with somebody else, you are more than receptive to anyone who confirms your own dark thoughts. I sensed that if I hung around today and accepted Mr. Ben Hassan’s hospitality, I would learn much more about the man I once thought I knew and understood.

  “If you can put up with me for another few hours,” I told Ben Hassan, “I’d very much like to stay.”

  “I think I can put up with you,” he said.

  FOURTEEN

  THERE WAS, INDEED, a large chain department store just five minutes from Monsieur Ben Hassan’s apartment. Ben Hassan explained how to find the H&M outpost, and said there was a café next door—The Parisian—that had Wi-Fi. I took what few worldly goods I had with me, knowing that a passport is something you never leave anywhere in Morocco, especially with a man who dealt in travel documents of an illegal variety.

  Ten minutes later I found myself back in a monocultural world of consumerist goods and fashion, an air-conditioned environment with a low hum of poppy Muzak which, some marketing guru no doubt reasoned, provides the right sonic smoothness to encourage you to buy more. As I filled my basket with several pairs of underwear, T-shirts, a pair of tan cotton pants, khaki shorts, two white linen shirts, and a pair of sandals, I felt another stab of desperate sadness. A fantasy Paul and I concocted just days earlier came back to me. Standing out on the balcony of our room, the sun declining into the Atlantic, a glass of wine in hand, still intoxicated with the love we had just made, the heat of the day diminishing, the light bathing the cityscape in a cognac glow . . .

  We’d talked excitedly about how we should consider a new way of dealing with the shallow consumer world and how we might live our lives with more purpose. How, perhaps, in four or five more years, Paul could take early retirement from the university; I could sell my accounting firm; our house in Buffalo would be paid off and could be sold and exchanged for a smaller house on the Maine coast, with a barn we could transform into a studio for Paul, and maybe with a large attic that we could convert into an office for me, where I could finally try to pound out the novel that had been gestating within me for years (but which, given my creative self-doubt, I’d never gotten around to starting): the story of my dad’s life, and the sadness inherent at the heart of the American dream.

  “You’ll be able to write and I’ll be able to draw without encumbrance,” he said. “If I manage to shift a few drawings a year, we can easily afford a couple of months here in Essaouira, or maybe somewhere in the South of France where I’ve heard you can rent cottages in the Pyrenees for three hundred euros a month.”

  “A life of ongoing adventure,” I added.

  “That will be us,” he said. “It’s all there for the asking. Even when we have our son or daughter with us.”

  I felt myself going rigid with fury again. Hurt and rage and . . .

  He has a daughter . . . and he has a wife.

  Another wife.

  “Madame, are you all right?”

  It was one of the shop assistants—a very pretty young woman, her hand on my arm, trying to steady me.
Did I need steadying?

  “Fine, fine,” I heard myself saying, even though I knew that was anything but the truth.

  “My apologies. I shouldn’t have intruded. Can I help you find anything?”

  “Toiletries. I need toiletries.”

  “And makeup?”

  “Do I need makeup?”

  “Madame, I am not trying to interfere. My apologies again.”

  “No, it’s me who’s sorry,” I said. This kind young woman informed me that the toiletries were on the second floor, near the café. I thanked her and went upstairs and bought deodorant and talcum powder and shampoo and conditioner and a hairbrush and a toothbrush and toothpaste and a face cream that ludicrously promised to reduce all noticeable wrinkles in two weeks. I paid for all my purchases (close to two thousand dirhams . . . prices were hardly bargain basement here), and asked the woman behind the register where I could find the nearest post office. She said there was one opposite a café called The Parisian. Now there was a bit of synchronicity. It was the café that Monsieur Ben Hassan told me had reasonable Wi-Fi. Leaving the department store I walked the block to the local outpost of Poste Maroc. I bought an extralarge padded envelope, reached into my backpack, and withdrew Paul’s one intact sketchbook, containing over fifty of his Essaouira drawings. I resisted the temptation to look through them again, certain that the sight of his artwork might toss me into further tumult. Instead I sealed the notepad into the envelope, wrote the name and address of my accounting firm on the front, then had it airmailed by registered post back to the States. I wanted to get Paul’s recent work home right away. I figured that, whatever was to become of us, he would be relieved to know that I had ensured his drawings had not been lost.

  Post office business concluded, I adjourned to the café across the street.

  The Parisian was very much a facsimile of one of those big brasseries in Paris—like La Coupole or the Terminus Nord—which I had read about in guidebooks and had vowed to loiter in someday. I found a table. I ordered un express and also asked the waiter if he could find me some bread and jam. I was ravenous. Seeing my computer, he told me the name of the network and the password that I needed to get online.

  I hadn’t checked email since the day before, so there were over forty emails awaiting me. Mostly spam or “Buy this!” commercial mail shots. A few professional matters to do with clients, all of which I answered while simultaneously forwarding them on to Morton.

  The coffee and sliced baguette arrived. I thanked the waiter and layered the bread with strawberry jam, eating it quickly, hunger and disorientation making me feel lightheaded. I drained the coffee in one go, then asked the waiter if he could get me another, along with un citron pressé.

  “Le petit déj’ est à 17h00,” he said with a smile. I managed to smile back.

  I switched over to a new screen, calling up the joint MasterCard that Paul and I shared; a credit card with a severely enforced credit limit, over which neither of us could spend. I checked the balance—and was horrified (but not surprised) to see that the $3,000 limit was maxed out. When I had last looked at the balance three days ago, it had only $300 we had run up on a week’s worth of eating out and small incidentals in Essaouira. Since yesterday, there had been two large cash withdrawals of ten thousand dirhams apiece, and a plane ticket on Royal Air Maroc this morning to Ouarzazate, plus a one-thousand-dirham charge for the Oasis Hotel in that same city. I googled the hotel and was directed to their website, where I discovered it was a two-star establishment with rooms at this low-season time of year costing four hundred dirhams a night. Which meant that he must have booked himself in for at least four nights. I wanted to call and find out if he was there right now, to confront him on the phone, to demand . . .

  His “wife”—his other wife—must live in Ouarzazate. So why did he drag us to Essaouira instead of going to that city where he could have snuck between the two of us? Why run here—to Casablanca—to see his daughter after I had exposed his deceptions? Why did his daughter reject him, and why did he feel the need to run off to his wife? And how did he get on an airplane without some piece of identification . . . like the passport he left behind, and which I was now carrying?

  Ouarzazate. I googled it and discovered that it was a city of around sixty thousand in the southeast of the country, that it was considered “the gateway to the Sahara,” that it had a film studio and was often used by foreign film companies as a location for anything with a desert setting, that the city prided itself on its “modern infrastructure and historic Saharan architecture,” that it was home to an international airport with daily flights to Casablanca and Marrakesh, and twice-weekly direct service to Paris Orly.

  It was now 5:12 in coastal North Africa and 12:12 in Buffalo. I found the printout of my changed Royal Air Maroc reservation. I went to their website. I tapped in my locator number. I switched over to the JetBlue website and changed my internal JFK to Buffalo flight to the same time tomorrow. The citron pressé arrived. I felt improved by this late-afternoon breakfast. I paid the waiter. On my way back to Ben Hassan’s I passed a florist and purchased a gift for my host: twelve long-stemmed lilies. Yes, I smelled my host’s deviousness. But he was also being hospitable—and I needed hospitality right now. And my mother would have climbed out of her grave to haunt me if I hadn’t followed one of her key social directives: always bring a gift.

  “Lilies!” Ben Hassan said when I returned to his apartment. “How did you know I so love this flower?”

  “Just a guess.”

  “Perhaps you think me death-obsessed?”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “When you weigh two hundred kilos and cannot walk more than two blocks without chest pains, yes, lilies do remind you that the River Styx is just a few streets away. But thank you for the gesture.”

  “Speaking of death wishes . . . I know that my husband is now in Ouarzazate. That’s where she lives, doesn’t she?”

  Monsieur Ben Hassan pursed his lips.

  “Paul told me that you were a dangerously thorough woman, as befits your profession. We will talk more over dinner. The guest bathroom, as you may remember, is two doors down on the right. If you throw your dirty clothes out into the corridor, Omar will have them washed and ironed by the time we return tonight. We don’t want to send you back to the United States with dirty laundry, now, do we?”

  “Don’t we all have dirty laundry, monsieur?” I asked.

  “Ah, you are an accountant with soul.”

  The bathroom was cramped; the shower a tiny stall with a handheld hose. But the water pressure was reasonable, the temperature hot. And it was good to strip out of clothes in which I had traveled and slept for the past twenty-four hours.

  Getting dressed in the new clothes, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and saw that the eight-hour snooze had lightened the dark circles below my eyes. The seismic disturbances within had hardly dissipated. But the upending of a life—your life—is so far better handled when you’ve had proper sleep and a very hot shower.

  “Don’t you look radiant,” Ben Hassan said when I wandered down the corridor and found him and Omar at work in the office in which multicolored passports were stacked high.

  “Thank you for all your kindnesses,” I said.

  “You deserve nothing less than that, madame. Especially with all that you have discovered in the past few hours. Not that Paul himself would ever stare directly into the wrecked ship that is his life. Who on earth wants to do that?”

  A pause, as Monsieur Ben Hassan let that last comment hang between us. Then he whispered something in Arabic to Omar, who got up from the laminating press at which he was at work on a Belgian passport. He brushed by me.

  “Time for a kir,” he said, “if that is agreeable with you.”

  “Yes, I could use a drink.”

  “Glad to hear it. I am a good Muslim who believes in Allah and the inevitable gates of paradise from which I can finally cast off this corpulent worldly shell and spend th
e rest of eternity floating capriciously in the celestial vapors. But I am a bad Muslim who also believes that it is very hard to get through the day without having a drink, or two, or three. In fact, I am rather suspicious of anyone who doesn’t drink. Paul doesn’t overindulge . . . unless the world is crowding in on him.”

  “So he was drinking heavily when he was here the other night?”

  “Of course. Especially after his daughter slammed the door in his face. But more on that anon. May I ask how you figured out that he went to Ouarzazate?”

  I explained how we shared the same credit card and we could track all purchases online.

  “You really are Big Brother,” he said.

  “Hardly. Had I been watching him closely I would have known long ago about his secret.”

  “You mean, his secrets.”

  “Yes, as I have discovered, they are plural. But let me ask you something—considering that Paul ran off without his passport, how did he get onto that Royal Air Maroc flight without any identification?”

  Ben Hassan smiled wryly, then fanned his hand out to indicate our immediate surroundings.

  “Surely you know the answer to that question already,” he said.

  “So he’s now traveling on what passport?”

  “British.”

  “How much did you charge him for the false document?”

  “My usual price is ten thousand dirhams.”

  “Which is why he withdrew that sum yesterday.”

  “Your powers of deduction are exceptional. But ten thousand dirhams is, I should point out, my ‘Friends and Family’ price. If you are someone in need of false documents owing to problems with the authorities the price does head considerably northward.”

  “You were benevolent toward your old friend.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Did Paul tell you why he showed up in Casablanca, without papers and in what I gather was an extreme mental state?”

  “The business with his daughter, of course—but how much exactly do you know of all that?”