“Now, Faiza’s brothers were not stupid. I discovered that they had hired some stooge to guard the rear of the apartment building where Paul lived. That rear entrance was located next to the building onto which he was going to jump. Anyway, I left the area, returning around a quarter hour before midnight. One of Faiza’s brothers was positioned outside Paul’s building. When I entered the adjoining building—still wearing the djellaba with its hood tied close across my face—the superintendent told me that their stooge was still out guarding the back door. Up I went to the roof. Even thirty years ago, walking up ten flights was torture for me. Still, there was Paul—on the other roof, looking down with fear at the gap between the two buildings, terrified of making the jump, rooted to the spot. I had to signal him with a cigarette lighter. When he wouldn’t move, I remember hissing at him, ‘If you don’t jump you are sentencing yourself to a lifetime of marital servitude with a woman who will grind your talent, your gift, into the ground. Stand still and die. Or jump and live.’
“Of course he jumped—and managed to twist his ankle on landing, which made things just a little complicated when it came to getting him down ten floors. But we eventually made it. The superintendent brought us down a series of corridors to the rear exit. Before Paul set foot outside he changed into the hooded djellaba I’d brought for him. He hobbled out the back door, leaning on my shoulder for support, walking right past the stooge who’d been posted by the brothers to look out for their sister’s fleeing American lover. When the guy saw Paul limping, he actually took his other arm and helped him to where I’d parked the beat-up Peugeot I drove back then. To his credit, despite being in terrible pain, Paul kept his mouth shut. And he’d tied the djellaba so tightly across his face that his very Caucasian identity remained hidden from view. The stooge had Paul by the other arm, asking me why he was limping. I informed him that he was deaf and dumb and had been set upon by bandits. Fortunately for us the man was so stupid, and also had a certain shred of kindness in him for an apparently disabled cripple, that he never once questioned the absurdity of the story I was spinning. He even wished us both luck as we drove off.
“I knew that Faiza’s father—having certain connections, owing to his position at the Moroccan Central Bank—was probably having the airport watched, or at least had made certain that Paul wouldn’t be able to board a flight back to the States. Which is why I drove him the six hours—no autoroutes in those days—up to Tangier, and got him on the six a.m. ferry to Malaga. I even gave him enough pesetas to get himself a doctor for his ankle, a hotel room for the night, and a train ticket up to Madrid. And then”—Ben Hassan snapped his fingers—“whoosh! Paul Leuen vanished from my life.”
“Surely he contacted you when he got back to the States?” I asked.
Ben Hassan shook his head.
“Did he ever repay you?”
Again he shook his head.
“What happened when the baby was born?”
“What happened? Faiza endured the shame of being a single mother. She wasn’t allowed to work at the lycée for several years, and struggled to make ends meet through tutoring and even cleaning other people’s apartments, as her family largely disowned her.”
“Surely she tried to contact Paul.”
“She tried. She failed. She went to the US Embassy with her father, demanding some sort of action, actually seeing if they could get him extradited back to Morocco and force him to play house with her. The US counsel said that, outside of finding an American lawyer who could try to chase Paul for child support, there was nothing they could do to get him back here. Though Faiza wrote him several times, showing him pictures of their baby daughter, he maintained his veil of silence. Even when I wrote him after—”
He broke off, reaching for his glass of wine, drained it in one go, poured himself another substantial slug, and polished off most of it immediately.
“After what?” I asked.
Ben Hassan hesitated before speaking.
“Faiza’s father was furious to discover that Paul had managed to slip out of the building undetected. He vented his rage at his sons who, in turn, beat up the sad little stooge who’d been guarding the back door. Beat him up so badly that he was hospitalized for months. Then, on their father’s orders, they strong-armed the superintendent of the building next door and found out who had whisked their now vanished brother-in-law away. The superintendent gave them my name. The two brothers cornered me leaving the École that evening. They dragged me into an alley. And used a hammer to smash all my fingers.”
“You’re serious?” I asked, my voice a stunned whisper. “They did that?”
He held out his hands.
“Every finger. Smashed to a pulp. All bones broken. The pain was so overwhelming I passed out. I was found hours later by a street cleaner. Thank God he ran into the École and found two of my colleagues still on duty, teaching night classes. They called the police and the pompiers, and both came with me to the hospital. Thank God as well they were there, as the doctor on duty was so appalled by the catastrophic state of my fingers that he wanted to have them amputated. My colleagues—both artists—insisted that he do nothing so rash. But the fingers were so pulverized that I was in a pair of casts for over a year. I got lucky. There was a French orthopedic surgeon who had decided on a change of scene and was on a three-year secondment to the big hospital here in Casablanca. He took an interest in my case—and convinced me to undergo a series of experimental bone reconstruction operations. Ten in total, followed by around three years of physiotherapy. It took those pathetic little men just two or three minutes to destroy my hands, and for me, over thirty-six months of agonizing surgery and reconstruction to be able to hold a pen again.”
I truly didn’t know what to say. Except: “Was Paul aware of the price you paid for helping him escape?”
“I wrote him . . . correction: I dictated a letter to him, as it was around two months after the attack. I explained what had befallen me in the wake of driving him to Tangier. I didn’t ask for any money or recompense. I just wanted him to know what had gone down, what those bastards did to me.”
“What was Paul’s reply?”
As Ben Hassan reached for his wine, I noticed for the first time just how much work it took him to grasp the stem of his glass, and how his large fingers were more misshapen than corpulent.
Ben Hassan took another long sip of wine, and I could see that he was steadying himself, tamping down some of the anger within.
“Paul’s reply was . . . silence. Even when I wrote him back another eight weeks after my first letter . . . nothing but silence.”
“I’m truly shocked that the brothers and father were never prosecuted for what they had perpetrated.”
“The police arrested the three of them. But Papa had connections. And the two boys said in court—yes, there was a hearing in front of a judge—that they had attacked me after I attempted to come on to one of them. This being the nineteen eighties they accepted gay-bashing as a defense. They reached an out-of-court settlement with me for one hundred thousand dirhams.”
“But that’s just twelve thousand dollars.”
“Back then it was enough to buy an apartment . . . which is what I did with the money. The apartment in which you will be staying tonight.”
“What happened to your hands?”
“The French surgeon was a miracle worker. He reconstructed the bones, and he reconnected certain nerve endings so I could have some feeling in them. But not an exceptional amount of feeling. Even today . . .”
He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a disposable lighter, ignited the flame, and held it directly under his left pinky—and didn’t flinch once as the flame came into direct contact with his flesh.
“As you can see,” he said, “there is considerable permanent numbness. And my ability to hold a paintbrush, even after the ten operations and all that physiotherapy . . . well, to be blunt about it, my career as a painter was decimated after what Faiza’s
brothers did. Those paintings you see in my apartment . . . à la recherche du temps perdu. Ancient history.”
“I don’t know what to say . . . what a terrible story.”
“That it is. Still, in Chinese calligraphy, the symbol for ‘crisis’ has two meanings: danger and opportunity. My opportunity in the wake of the attack on my hands was to become . . . how shall I put this? . . . a facilitator. Someone who could pull strings, grease palms, work wonders with travel documents, settle scores.”
I had a question I didn’t dare pose. Ben Hassan did it for me.
“I sense you want to know what happened to Faiza’s father and brothers, after they bought me my apartment. Faiza, wanting to repay me in kindness for the cruelty her family had inflicted upon me, regularly visited me in the hospital and insisted on hiring people to do the initial decorative work on the new apartment. I can’t say that we were ever friends. She’s quite the bitter, disappointed woman. She never truly got over losing Paul, especially as the next man in her life was a stockbroker who was, in my opinion, Prince Not So Bright, though I gather he could play a decent round of golf. By the time Samira was an adolescent, their mother-daughter relationship was like something out of a bad Joan Crawford film. Then the stockbroker lost everything, including their home. Samira lived in my guest room for several months, then went to France for a spell, but didn’t have a carte de séjour so she couldn’t find work. Even though she could have gotten an American passport through her father, the fact that he never claimed paternity and refused all letters from Samira to meet her, or at least tell the US authorities that, yes, she was his daughter . . . that made it administratively difficult for her. And her bitterness just grew.
“Faiza, meanwhile, managed to alienate the director of the lycée where she taught. But then, at a cocktail thing here in town, she met a man named Hamsad who was the director of the film studios in Ouarzazate. Within months she was living down there on the edge of the Sahara—a place which, though somewhat picturesque, has always struck me as a recipe for despair after seventy-two hours. Still, with her daughter estranged from her, with another relatively well-heeled man willing to look out for her, and even a job opening at a language school there . . . off she went to the desert. That was five years ago. The relationship fell apart after around eighteen months. Hamsad showed her the door. I gather that she’s still teaching at the language institute, and she was rather supportive of Samira when she fell pregnant and her foreign lover returned to France.”
“So history repeats itself.”
“Only, in this instance, the gentleman—his name is Philippe—acted reasonably. He’s paying close to the equivalent of five hundred euros a month in child support, and also offering to part-finance an apartment for Samira and her child.”
“With my husband paying the other half.”
“As I said earlier, when Paul contacted me out of the blue seven months ago—clearly in the wake of his little surgical procedure to secretly deny his new wife a child—I was flabbergasted. When I heard him sounding sad and guilty about being such a bad father to Samira . . . well, how can I put this? I saw an opportunity . . .”
“For revenge?”
“For payback.”
“By which you mean?”
“We communicated for several weeks by email and spoke twice on the phone. He sounded increasingly unstable and just a little haunted. Especially as he’d written twice to Samira who informed him by return email that she wanted absolutely nothing to do with him; that he couldn’t simply drop back into her life after thirty years and think there was any chance whatsoever of a relationship. He had ignored her time and again when she’d needed him most. Whatever it was he now wanted from her—forgiveness, absolution—she was unwilling and unable to give.
“But Paul refused to give up. That’s when he asked me directly if there was something he could do for his daughter. At which point . . . a plan fell into my head.”
My mind was racing. As someone who had spent much of her accounting career second-guessing malevolent tax inspectors and certain fraudulent clients, I did have an intuitive nose for a scam, a subterfuge, an ambush.
“You decided to set him a trap,” I said.
“I decided to give the man what he wanted . . . which, on a certain existential level, might be interpreted as being what Monsieur Paul also subconsciously thought he deserved. Payback for abandoning his daughter and not once offering assistance or even basic compassion and decency for his great friend whose life was, on a certain level, ruined by his thoughtlessness and callous disregard. I told him that his daughter needed an additional one million dirhams to buy her apartment . . . and that she couldn’t afford a mortgage of that magnitude.”
“Was that the truth?”
“Put it this way—she wasn’t asking for the money and her lover had given her enough to put down a deposit on a small two-bedroom apartment in this quartier.”
“Did you lead him to believe that, having given her essentially half of her apartment, he would repair his relationship with her?”
“Perhaps.”
“And let me guess—you also told him that, in order to borrow the money from you, he would have to come back to Morocco to sign the papers and give you the first payment?”
He laced his fingers together again, and gazed into its cathedral-like structure.
“Absolutely.”
“Since he never spent any time away from me while here, where did you meet him to sign the documents and get his first payment?”
“I had Omar drive me to Essaouira. We had a very pleasant lunch at Chez Fouad while you were off improving your French and walking the beach, if my memory serves me well. He signed the papers, and he paid over the first month’s repayment. As you strike me as somewhat legally minded, I took the liberty of bringing along the loan agreement—which was notarized by a local notary whom I also arranged to meet us at Chez Fouad.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a three-page document in French and Arabic. I scanned it briefly, turning to the back page to see my husband’s telltale cramped signature, right next to a notary’s seal and corroborating signature. On the second page I found the piece of information I also needed: the terms of the loan. I could see that the 1 million dirhams would be paid back over five years, at an annual rate of 320,000 dirhams, in payments of 26,660 dirhams per month—around $2,700, or close to $32,000 per annum. As Paul only earned $100K gross from the university and maybe another $15K, tops, for his artwork, by the time he’d finished paying taxes, Social Security, and his share of the mortgage, he had around $40K to cover his car costs, his share of utilities and groceries, his cell phone, his health club, and contribute to the month away on the Maine coast we allowed ourselves every summer. That gave him very little left over from the five hundred a week he had to meet all these not extravagant expenses. And then to take on a loan that was going to cost him $2,700 every month . . . and all for nothing . . . it was madness.
I tossed the document back in front of Ben Hassan.
“You are certainly getting your revenge on your friend. And you will be making six hundred thousand dirhams out of this little loan.”
“Madame, I am not Société Générale or Chase Manhattan Bank. I am a businessman, and one who had to dig into his resources to finance his friend.”
The Blue Hour Page 17