THE BOY FROM THE TANGIER SOUK

by Richard Savin

  THE BOY FROM THE

  TANGIER SOUK

  Richard Savin

  OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

  NOVELS:

  A RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS

  THE GIRL IN THE BAKER’S VAN

  MORE THAN ONE PASSION

  THE HAUNTING OF THE HARLEQUIN GOAT

  GIRLS AND BOYS COME OUT TO PLAY

  THE SUDDEN DEATH OF A CUCUMBER

  MEMOIRES

  TURN LEFT AT ISTANBUL

  IN THE COMPANY OF GOATS

  VAKILABAD-IRAN

  OPERATION TORCH

  By 1942 Churchill had managed to persuade American president Franklin D Roosevelt to mount a joint allied invasion of Vichy French North Africa, a move which would open the route to what Churchill referred as the soft underbelly of Europe.

  Operation Torch was planned for the 8th of November 1942. To improve the chances of success General Eisenhower sought to enlist the help of the local resistance – in Algiers and Casablanca. Hitler was well aware that his southern flank was vulnerable and already had contingency plans to take over Vichy France should an attack be launched against French Morocco and Algeria. On the northern tip of the continent was the neutral territory of Spanish Morocco with its cosmopolitan city of Tangier. In better times the city had been the popular haunt of tourists and cruise ships, but in 1942 Tangier had become a home to spies and agents, for all the combatants and their allies.

  Copyright Richard Savin

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  © Richard Savin 2020

  A Grumpy Goat publication

  Margate

  England

  THE BOY FROM THE

  TANGIER SOUK

  Chapter 1

  Casablanca 1942

  For three days a deep storm had railed, thrashing its way across the city, driving the people to find shelter where they might.

  Outside the city, in the desert, water had run freely across the bone hard ground, filling every gully with torrents of muddy yellow; swelling stream beds till they belched.

  Now the night air was still. The storm had blown itself out.

  At dusk the call of the muezzins had brought the faithful to prayer; from high up in slender minarets, their plaintive calls echoing out across the city. As the noisy activity of the day began to subside, people went to the mosques to make their devotions. Afterwards, inside the houses, lamps were lit, shutters were closed and the aroma of preparations for the evening meal seeped into the night air.

  Inside the souks, the small shop fronts had been boarded. Only the coffee shops showed any sign of life; the low murmur of conversation drifting through the streets accompanied by the bubbling of water pipes as men sat in small knots discussing the day and playing chequers.

  In a narrow alley, the figure of a man walked through the dark with little more than the illumination of the stars and occasional puddles of lamp light to make out his way. The clothes he wore were crumpled and unkempt; clothes that looked like they might have been slept in. His unseen face carried a careless stubble of three days and spoke of a man who might easily be a fugitive. He moved stealthily as if bent on some mission or quest, turning his head furtively as he passed the mouths of the many side alleys leading away to the right and left; eyes alert, probing the shadows.

  He did not hear the light shuffle of sandaled feet until it was too late. They came up briskly from behind; three shadows, one on each side quickly grabbing his wrists, holding them down tight to his sides while a third threw a sack over his head. He tried to cry out but the sack was drawn so tight it blocked his mouth. They pulled the sack down hard until it enveloped his whole body. A leather belt was strapped around him, pinning his arms to his sides. Desperately, he tried to kick out at the assailants but he was pulled off balance and landed on his back with a force that knocked the air out of his lungs. Then a rope was tied tightly around his ankles.

  From the dark of one of the alleys another figure emerged pulling a creaking wooden cart, the iron banded wheels gritting on the uneven cobbles of the street. The three assailants picked up the still writhing body and dumped it heavily into the cart. Then there was silence. The victim in the sack had given up the struggle. After a while two more men came and threw a pile of heavy carpets over him.

  In the dark a match flared as one of the assailants lit a cigarette. By the light of its flame his face showed fair, and his hair pale like straw; it was clear he was not a native of Casablanca, nor any other city in North Africa.

  *

  Further to the North, in the souks and the lanes of Tangier, doors were also being closed, shutters battened and locked; wares that were normally kept outside, taken in to safety. The same deluge that had fallen on Casablanca would shortly be theirs.

  Through the arched gate of the old Medina a boy made his way in the gathering gloom. It was barely the mid-afternoon, but with the leaden weight of the cloud above it might just as well have been night. Under this threatening canopy, the boy entered the souk of the sellers of cloth, stopping at the first shop that he saw was still open. The cloth merchants, he knew, would have soft bales, a comfortable place to sleep.

  At the open front of the shop a trader was sitting, half dozing, at a table. This, the boy decided, was a good prospect. If he played his hand carefully he would find shelter and a place to sleep for the night

  ‘Salaam Baba,’ he said politely. Do you have one place for me tonight? Mar sha Allah. The blessings of Allah will be on you. The storm will be strong and there may be thieves in the night, Baba, give me one place and I will keep watch for you.’

  The trader looked up through the narrow gap of the buildings and rooftops to the blackening sky. Then he looked into the depth of his shop. ‘There is a bale of cottons in the store at the back. You can sleep there tonight – but be sure you wash. They are valuable.’

  As he spoke the first rumble of thunder rolled out across the city.

  ‘Here,’ the trader called to the boy. ‘Be useful, earn your bed for tonight. Help me to close up the shutters.’

  Outside, only the dogs remained on the streets, crouching and shivering under whatever refuge they could find.

  Chapter 2

  A hostile land

  Across the water, on the margins of Europe in the small Spanish port of Cadaqués, a woman stood on a stone jetty, shading her eyes against the hazy glare of the afternoon sun.

  At her back a row of decrepit buildings lined the steep abutment where the hills behind them tumbled down into the street – warehouses, stores, fishermen’s sheds stuffed with tackle and festooned with nets; a ramshackle, chaotic mix of commercial depots and places of habitation. Lofts, with cracked wooden doors bleached by years of blazing summers, where whole fishing families lived, all pressed tightly together.

  Set amongst them here and there a café or a bar – the first port of call for the fishermen, once their catch had been safely boxed and landed. Beyond this collection of tired
buildings, above the ragged line of their sagging tin roofs, neater whitewashed cottages climbed up the rocky slope, each one clinging precariously to its toehold. Figs grew on short twisted trees that had been carefully stunted so their owners could reach the ripening fruit. The surrounding patches of poor stony ground were planted with tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and courgettes. Chilis in rough terracotta pots; green pods, waiting on the sun to burn them red. The ragged tentacles of squash, grey with dust, competed for what space could be found; and everywhere melons scattered in patches. Each garden was a tiny self-sufficient island, hemmed around and protected by low rocky walls and barricades of aggressive cactus; their flat fleshy leaves bristling with spines.

  The woman sniffed tentatively at the stiffening wind. ‘What do you think, José?’

  ‘I think, Mademoiselle Evangeline, it will be bad if all it brings is sand from the desert. If we are lucky there should be some rain.’

  ‘Will you go back to La Vajol tonight?’

  ‘Yes, and then to Perpignan. I have been away too long and there will be questions if I am missed.’

  The small crowd that had been slowly congregating on the jetty was beginning to swell. When she had arrived there had been a mere handful. Now they were joined by others to form a throng. A sea of anxious faces all staring into the distance, eyes fixed on the horizon trying to be the first to catch the tell-tale vestige of a mast; that thin perpendicular black line which was the herald for the fishing boats that would soon arrive and land their catch. In the early hours of each morning, before it was light, a dozen or so small, brightly coloured boats left for the fishing grounds and were gone for most of the day. In the afternoon the housewives of the village came down to the jetty in ones and twos and there they congregated in anticipation of the landing. There was the low babble of Catalan being spoken, furtively because the language had been forbidden ever since the end of the Civil War. It was the punishment meted out to the Catalan nation because it had supported the Republicans; a price to be paid for being on the losing side. The Generalissimo, Francisco Franco Bahamonde – Franco to some, though officially El Caudillo (The Leader) – was not a man to forgive easily.

  A woman looked over at Evangeline, a glint of hostility reflected in her eyes. She turned and muttered something to those closest to her in a voice that then grew incautiously loud. It was joined by her companions with a hostile grumbling.

  Evangeline turned to avoid the woman’s stare. ‘What are they saying, José? I don’t understand this dialect.’

  ‘She has complained that you buy the best fish and pay too much. It pushes up the prices. She says you are probably in the pay of the Guardia Civil – she doesn’t like foreigners, they can’t be trusted.’

  ‘That is false and we should tell them so.’

  José shook his head. ‘Leave it, mademoiselle,’ he counselled in a low voice. ‘Best not to draw attention to yourself; it will not change their view. They are peasants; they are suspicious of everyone who is a stranger.’

  A cry went up turning the attention away from Evangeline as a young woman pointed a finger out to sea; the first mast had appeared.

  It was not even the start of April and already the weather was becoming hotter than she cared for. Evangeline had arrived on the first day of March, across the mountains on foot, through the last of the winter snow, half frozen to death, pursued by the Gestapo and the Carlingue. Then, when she had come here to the small fishing town of Cadaqués, the weather had been fine and gently warming, like an Alsace summer in her home town of Turckheim. But this was Spain and the summer of 1942 was shaping up to be uncomfortably hot.

  North, across the border in Vichy, it would be cooler but she knew she dared not go back. The French police were now more diligent and there was growing discontent. Prime Minister Laval’s new labour laws were sending Frenchmen, and sometimes French women, to work in the German munitions factories –

  the same factories that had produced the weapons that had so thoroughly beaten the French army barely two years before. It was slave labour. Yet, no matter how much the French people detested the Laval regime, the aged president Maréchal Pétain had still managed to cling to his popularity. He was old and tired; a mere puppet of the Berlin Nazis and yet, by many, he was still hailed as the ‘saviour of France’.

  José looked cautiously around the crowded quay, bustling with women, many of them dressed in the black of widowhood. It was not just that they were suspicious of strangers; at least half of them had lost their men to the Civil War, men who would have provided them with security and status. Men who were now dead or prisoners, or on the run across the border and fearful to come home because of the reprisals. There was a palpable resentment of foreigners generally but a special hatred had been stoked up for the Germans. Without them it was possible that the Nationalists would have lost the war, and this is what people believed.

  José eyed them furtively, sensing the simmering hostility towards Evangeline. Her pale skin and her fair hair marked her as an outsider. She was French, and from the north; worse, she was from Alsace so she might just as well have been a German.

  ‘When you have bought your fish we should leave, mademoiselle,’ he said quietly. ‘It is not good to stay here too long. These people are resentful.’

  It was a kilometre back to the house. First along the road that fronted the seashore, then through the narrow winding backstreets where the lime-washed houses stood cheek by jowl in tightly packed terraces, each house stamped with its own irregular identity. There was no uniformity, no standardisation, none of the order she had been used to in her native Alsace. At every turn there were the ancient relics of another time, of the Moorish occupation and the Islamic Caliphate. She walked slowly up the steep cobbled streets together with José and her purchase: a very large loup de mer weighing nearly two kilos, which he had kindly offered to carry for her.

  When the boats had arrived and the fish were being sold she had left José to haggle. She stood a little way off, out of the view of the fishermen, who would otherwise smell her money and inflate their prices.

  As they reached the outer edge of the town, the streets continued to rise steeply to where the house she had rented was located. It stood close to the outskirts in a fine position with a panoramic view across the orange brown and brick red of the roofs, and away out to the sea. It had a garden fenced around by a good stone wall with large iron gates that kept out the curious and the unwanted. In a secluded back garden there was a bench under a small grove of orange trees that offered shade from the already fierce late spring sun.

  At the front, there was a magnificently ancient and statuesque umbrella pine. It stood in close company with two wind-racked palms; their fronds still ragged from the winter storms, and which now waved in the strengthening breeze like unruly hair.

  Evangeline unlocked the gate with an iron key, which was too large to carry in her purse and had to be carted around in the bottom of her shopping bag.

  ‘Will you stay and eat with us, José?’ she asked quietly as they got to the front door. ‘It is a very big fish – it will be too much for just me and Alain.’

  José gave a polite nod. ‘I shall be pleased to share this very good fish with you,’ he said graciously. ‘The bus to Figueres does not leave till late so I have time – thank you.’

  Over the evening meal Alain posed the question again, the same question Evangeline had asked down on the jetty. ‘I don’t understand why they don’t like us, especially that big woman, the one who my sister says is always waiting for the fishing boats.’

  ‘Ah, la Señora Magri Rojas. You should understand she is a very forceful woman. She has some influence among many of the people in the town, especially the poorer ones; she has appointed herself to speak for them. Her husband works on the estate of a very powerful local family. As I have told your sister, you are foreigners and rich by their standards. It will not be easy to make yourself liked here.’

  Alain poured some straw-coloure
d wine from an open carafe into three glasses. His face bore the expression of mild contempt. ‘These people are like their wine, coarse and uncultured. We should just ignore them.’

  ‘It is difficult in a such a small town, Monsieur Alain; everyone knows everyone and their business. You would be better living in a city: Girona, or even Barcelona. It would be easier to remain unknown – city people are not like these people, they keep their business to themselves and let others do the same.’

  Over supper the talk turned to la resistance. It was consolidating. In 1940 it had been no more than a handful of disparate groups; resentful men and women, not yet organised, at least not beyond each individual district. Now, with the help of the British and De Gaulle’s Free French, it was growing.

  ‘I want to go back, José.’

  Evangeline stiffened, a trace of fear flickering in her eyes. She looked from one man to the other, hoping that José would persuade her brother to stay where he was.

  ‘You can’t. Alain. Please, don’t.’

  He put out a hand and laid it on his sister’s arm. ‘I have to, I can’t just sit here when good men are dying for France. The resistance needs men. Is that not so José?’ The other man looked sympathetically at her but said nothing and she knew it was a lost cause.

  ‘Alain, you can’t. You have already been arrested once. Your release was a miracle – miracles don’t come in pairs.’

  Her brother squeezed her arm. ‘I have to, Evi.’

  ‘You will be caught, I know you will. You are on their list – the Gestapo have your name, as they do mine. José, for God’s sake, tell him.’