“Now I know why Paul was so insistent that we spend these weeks in Morocco. You wouldn’t give him the money unless he was in the country. Because that would mean you’d have him here, potentially ensnared. I bet you didn’t even tell Samira that her father gave her the one million dirhams.”
“She just closed on the apartment last week, and won’t move in for another month. Perhaps it was an oversight on my part not to mention that Paul had helped her.”
He was barely containing a smile as he said this.
“Bullshit,” I said. “You wanted him to confront her on her doorstep and let her slam the door in his face.”
“Perhaps. But do remember, madame, that the only reason he came running up to Casablanca was because you caught him out in his little lie.”
“And then he probably called you in a panic, asking you to smooth the way for him to see Samira. You gave him her address, and didn’t warn her he’d be showing up, knowing what her reaction would be.”
“Revenge is a dish best served cold,” he said.
“How did you revenge yourself on Faiza’s father and brothers?”
“That’s for you to find out. But, again, Madame Robin, I must say that I am most taken and impressed by you. And my advice to you is very straightforward: Get up tomorrow, head for the airport, cut your losses, leave your husband to whatever destiny brings his way.”
“And if Paul doesn’t pay you the monthly vig?”
Ben Hassan unlocked his fingers and stared directly at me, a stare as arctic as it was menacing.
“What will happen to your dear husband if he doesn’t meet his legally binding commitment to me? I will have the great pleasure of watching Omar use a hammer to smash every one of his fingers.”
SIXTEEN
AS SOON AS Ben Hassan uttered his threat, the temptation arose to toss the contents of my wineglass in his face. For several edgy moments I had to keep the glass fixed to the table and under control. Ben Hassan worked out what I was stopping myself from doing. He raised a finger, saying, “If you create havoc here—and shame me in public—there will be ramifications.”
“You’re a gangster.”
“That is an interpretation. As is the fact that I am your only friend here.”
“A ‘friend’ who tricked my husband.”
“Your husband is the architect of his own despair. He approached me. He begged for a way back to his daughter. I gave it to him.”
“While achieving payback at the same time.”
“He knew how much I would be charging him for the money. He accepted the sum. He knew that he would have to return to Morocco to sign the papers—and yes, now you know the real reason why you came to Morocco this summer. He accepted that too. I did warn him that finding a way back into Samira’s heart would be challenging; that she grew up haunted by the absence of her father and the way he never once contacted her. She herself must have written Paul at least once a year until she was twenty-five. Even after that terrible rupture with her mother, she still held on to the naive hope that, somehow, he was going to be the good father and rescue her from her immense loneliness. In short, he was fully aware that, by trying to reengage with his exceptionally messy past, he was walking right back into a compromised and precarious situation. But he still chose to head across the Atlantic and into my open arms. And you, innocent you, who knows all about absentee fathers and men who are in endless negotiation with their various conflicted selves . . . you should now lose the maternal protectiveness that you cloak Paul in and let him play the adult for a change. But you can’t do that, can you? Which is why you want to dash that glass in my face—and, in doing so, earn my displeasure . . . which, as I think you can sense by now, is not a wise thing to court.”
“Because you might smash my fingers? Or maybe I’ll suffer the same fate meted out to Faiza’s father and brothers?”
“I don’t remember alluding to any fate being ‘meted’ out to them.”
“But they are no longer with us, right?”
“I never said that.”
“Because I didn’t ask it before. But I’m asking it now.”
“Why don’t you ask Faiza about all that? Because that’s where you’re heading now, aren’t you? In fact, let me expedite matters for you and give you her address in Ouarzazate.”
“Oh, you’re a mind reader, are you?”
“Actually I am. I know you are simply someone who can’t walk away, even if it means following the man who betrayed you into the vortex.”
He pulled out a notebook and an elegant silver pen, then scribbled away for a few moments before tearing the page out and handing it to me.
“Here is Madame Faiza’s phone number and address. Of course, you already know the name of the hotel where Paul is staying.”
“Why haven’t you dispatched Omar there to drag him back?”
“Because the next payment isn’t due for another ten days. Of course, if you prefer to pay that now . . .”
“I don’t have sixteen thousand dirhams on me in cash.”
“And I don’t accept credit cards. Anyway he has ten days of grace. Meanwhile, you are still more than welcome to avail yourself of our extra bed tonight.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Just trying to be generous. The other option is an all-night bus that leaves the Central Station at eleven p.m. I know this because that is the bus which Paul boarded last night. It is a monstrous journey, via Marrakesh, of around ten hours. Or there is a flight at six fifty tomorrow morning on Royal Air Maroc. But a last-minute ticket is something on the expensive side. Around five thousand dirhams one way. The bus, on the other hand, is one hundred and fifty dirhams. Your call, madame.”
“You’re going to call Faiza as soon as I’ve left the restaurant, warn her I’m on my way.”
“Actually, you’re wrong there. I’m going to make no such call. I’m going to let the element of surprise guide things from now on. Like the look on Monsieur Paul’s face when you surprise him at his hotel room. Or perhaps finding him in Madame Faiza’s bed.”
“Whatever I discover, I am ready for it.”
“I love a forward-thinking realist. But before you dash off into the night . . . surely you will want to try one of the celebrated desserts they make here. The baklava is especially sublime. And the patron will no doubt offer us a very good digestif to accompany le thé à la menthe. You still have almost forty-five minutes before the bus leaves. It is a mere ten minutes by taxi from here to—”
I stood up, hoisting the backpack, uncertain what my next move should be.
“Going so soon?” he asked. “A pity.”
“Are you going to keep your word about not contacting anybody in Ouarzazate?”
“Madame, if I give my word I always keep it. Which is why, when I lend money, I always remind the client that they have my word that all will run smoothly as long as the money is paid back on time. If you do catch up with your husband, do tell him I will expect to see him on the first of August. Without fail. And if you think you can spirit him out of the country and somehow elude me . . . do please think again.”
Then, slowly pushing back his chair and gingerly elevating his mountain of a body to its feet, he executed a small, very formal bow and uttered two words: “Bon voyage.”
I stared at him, long and hard, trying to communicate the fact that he didn’t frighten me. Truth be told, he terrified me.
“Until next time.”
Out on the street I didn’t know what to do next. I needed to think cleanly, logically. I had forty minutes to make the bus. Finding a taxi seemed to be no problem. There were plenty around here. But the thought of ten hours on a bus heading south over the Atlas Mountains—and an all-night bus at that—filled me with dread. Yet my budget needed to be managed with care. So I decided, in the first instance, to hurry back to The Parisian and go online and find out whether a flight was available tomorrow at dawn and whether there was a way of ensuring that it wouldn’t break the bank.
T
he café was a three-minute walk. I ordered a Perrier and told the waiter that I might have to leave within ten minutes. Then I opened up my laptop and, using assorted travel sites, discovered that, yes, the actual price of the ticket was 5,400 dirhams, but one last-minute site was offering it for 2,600 dirhams—just over $300. Not a bargain, but still cheaper than the official price. I booked myself onto it. The Perrier arrived. I informed the waiter I was no longer in a rush. I drank the fizzy water, allowing its soothing properties to act as an antidote to all the food consumed, and to momentarily balm my considerable distress.
Another search engine led to me a hotel—The Select—located just three streets away from here. One star, very basic, but the photos of the spartan rooms indicated a degree of cleanliness, and it was cheap. They didn’t have an online booking service, but I asked the waiter if I could borrow a phone. He offered his own, and turned down my offer of ten dirhams for its use, “As long as you are calling locally.” I assured him that I was just phoning down the street, and quickly punched in the hotel’s number, which connected immediately. I explained I needed a room until four this morning.
“No problem,” the man at the front desk told me.
Five minutes later I was at the reception desk of the hotel. There was an elderly man in a shiny suit behind the counter. I paid cash and told him I needed a wake-up call at 4:00 a.m. and a taxi here promptly at 4:30.
“I’ll handle it,” he said.
“And please, I am counting on you to bang on my door loudly at four.”
The room was Early Nothing. Basic drab furniture. A hard double bed with much-laundered, stiff sheets and a floral bedspread. A sink, a toilet, a tiny shower stall with a meager hose. I undressed and brushed my teeth. I rubbed some of the miracle face cream into my face. I noted that I would be having to get up again in five hours and cursed myself for not having found a bookshop in the shopping center late this afternoon and choosing something there in the English-language section.
Then my mind began to race. How would Paul react to my arrival in Ouarzazate, how would he deal with the realization that I knew all about Ben Hassan, and that we were going to have to figure out some way of getting out of Morocco undetected? Didn’t I read somewhere that the border with Algeria had been closed by the Moroccan authorities since that very bloody and frightening civil war in the 1990s? Could we get into Mauritania on US passports without a visa? Would Ben Hassan have people watching for us at the port at Tangier?
But these logistical questions were overshadowed by a flashback I had of my father. I was eighteen and had just arrived at the University of Minnesota. My second day there, Dad called me from Las Vegas (of course) to tell me that the professional windfall he’d been waiting for had finally come his way.
“Here’s the thing, kiddo,” he said. “Just had this big interview for a senior job in casino management out here. A VP for Human Resources at Caesar’s Palace. The guy who interviewed me today told me I was head and shoulders above all candidates. So looks like me and your Mom will be singing ‘Viva Las Vegas’ before too long. And as soon as my John Hancock is on that employment contract, I am organizing that big Christmas trip I’ve been promising you and your mom for years to Hawaii.”
“No rush, Dad. I mean, Hawaii has never been on my list of priorities.”
“Well, if you want to transfer next semester to Columbia . . .”
“Minnesota offered me the full scholarship, Dad.”
“You’re being too nice here, Robin. My little girl gets admitted to an Ivy League university and has to go to State U because her deadbeat father can’t afford to pay the tuition.”
“Don’t think that. You’re a wonderful dad.”
“I don’t deserve such kindness.”
Then the line went dead. As this conversation took place in 1993, well before everyone had cell phones, I had no way of knowing the number from which he had been calling me. Nor did he call me back—though I waited by the phone in my dorm for an hour, hoping he and I might finish the conversation.
But no call ever came.
Until six the next morning. Only the person on the phone was my mother. And her voice was so hushed that she could hardly get out the words.
“Your father died last night.”
I remember the world going so quiet that all peripheral noise seemed to have been smothered.
“He had a heart attack after losing five thousand at the craps table.”
She’d heard this from the cops in Vegas. He’d been winning all night, then put all his chips on one throw of the dice. Which didn’t go his way. This time he didn’t weather the impact of another act of self-sabotage. This time it proved overwhelming to his psyche . . . and the cardiac incident that followed killed him. How I’ve assembled and reassembled this scene in my mind since then—and all based on those few tough, terse details that my angry mother supplied. How part of the overwhelming grief that followed—the sense that I was now very much alone in a difficult world—was also wracked with the incessant reproach that kept ringing in my ears for months, years afterward, a lament that, truth be told, has never faded away: you should have been able to save him.
Was that what was at work now? Was that what I was chasing here: a chance at redemption? Was I somehow convincing myself that—despite the desperate betrayal, despite the realization that I had been truly shammed—I still needed to rescue my husband from harm as a way of appeasing the guilt about my tragically affectionate wreck of a father, the man who gave me the only actual love I’d ever encountered until Paul Leuen walked into my life? Might I claw back a little final peace if I could do what I was too young and too unschooled in life’s harsh contours to do at the time? Was that why I was sitting alone in this sad cheap hotel room, my brain on overdrive, so desperate to find Paul and bring some resolution to all this?
I can fix this. I must fix this. I will fix this.
Heaviness clouded my eyes. Then came darkness. And several hours of mental void before the loud knock on the door. I had a fast shower and was in the taxi to the airport at the agreed time of 4:30. Casablanca in the middle of the night was still the strange faceless metropolis I’d briefly passed through, in which the sense of ugly modern sprawl was omnipresent.
At the airport I picked up my boarding pass and then proceeded on to the Royal Air Maroc ticket counter, where I was told that, if I didn’t fly to New York today on the scheduled flight onto which I had been rebooked, I would lose the ticket.
“But I changed it once already,” I said. “Can’t I please change it again?”
“That was an exceptional change, clearly made by someone in authority,” the clerk told me. “If you can get back in touch with him before your flight departs at midday, then perhaps he can make a second exceptional change. But I cannot do anything, madame. My apologies.”
The flight south was on a small turboprop with just thirty seats. The sun was ascending as we took off. After twenty minutes, we passed over Marrakesh and the Atlas Mountains came into crisp silhouette. These were no mere hills but proper stern alpine peaks: craggy, with switchback roads frequently defining their vertical terrain. There were dazzling valleys. There were impossibly positioned villages clinging to mountainsides. There was even a hint of snow atop one summit.
Then, out of nowhere, the sand began. It was as if someone had flipped a topological switch, transporting us out of high rugged terrain and into a world of endless aridity. Sand that was not white, but actually bathed in a bleached red ocher. Sand that was full of strange undulations and irregularities. Sand that was duned and, in the emerging sunlight, crimson. Sand that stretched into an absolute infinity. Sand that could bury you with ruthless disinterest. Sand on a scale and a dimension that I had never glimpsed before; a realm so well known by mythic repute, yet so unseen by most of the planet’s habitants. That ultimate empty quarter. The Sahara.
We were coming into land, passing buildings that had a 1930s French Foreign Legion look about them. The sand was just bey
ond; the encroaching reality abutting the city’s frontiers. As apprehensive and tense as I was—as much as I dreaded the confrontation that was ahead of me—there was still something extraordinary about my first sighting of the Sahara. The airport also seemed 1940s desert military—hot and fly-blown. Inside the arrivals hall was an information desk, manned by a young woman in a hajib. I told her the name of the hotel I was seeking. She knew it immediately and said it was a short taxi ride from here. I also showed her the scrap of paper on which Ben Hassan had scribbled Faiza’s address. She got out a map of Ouarzazate and marked the location of the hotel, then used a yellow highlighter to trace a route to Faiza’s front door. It was, she said, about five minutes by foot.
“Don’t pay the taxi driver more than thirty dirhams,” she said. “If he says no, tell him that you are going to report him to me—Fatima. He’ll know who I am. They all do.”
Actually the cabbie accepted the offer of thirty dirhams without the usual bartering. The Oasis Hotel was just off the very wide main drag that, at eight in the morning, still seemed half awake. I took in the desert deco architecture, the languid men loitering in cafés, the blast-furnace heat. The cab had no air-conditioning. According to the gauge on the dashboard the temperature was 43 degrees Celsius—an astonishing 109 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time we reached the hotel—all of two minutes later—my lightweight clothes were sodden.
The Oasis was, at first glance, a slightly shabbier version of our hotel in Essaouira. At least the lobby was air-conditioned—and the heavyset woman behind the desk was welcoming. When I explained that I was Paul Leuen’s wife, I could see her lips tighten.
“Monsieur Leuen just went out for a walk,” she said.
“Really?”
“You seem surprised.”
“It’s a bit early for a walk, that’s all.”
“Monsieur Leuen . . . he was out walking until three a.m., so my night man told me. And he came in very intoxicated. I am sorry to report this, madame.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
The Blue Hour Page 18