A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  The first pill brought the imitation of death, so close to the reality that not a heartbeat stood between the two conditions. No mid-century anatomist could tell the difference.

  The latter, the black pill, blocked respiration throughout the body. Within ten minutes of ingestion, no trace of the person remained apart from a peppery haze: a case officer’s death.

  “At some point between midnight and two o’clock this morning, you will ingest the blue pill. This is a recommendation from the corps of consultants, Agent Enver Eleven. It represents our consensus. Do you accept and make the decision of your own mind?”

  “Yes.”

  “I recommend you find the Marrakesh Protestant graveyard. We have had trouble, in the past, recovering our agents from Muslim cemeteries. They are not as serious about mortuary preservation. Over time, the bodies tend to move or the parts can be combined. Somewhere safe and quiet is better. And, I say, good luck to you. Good luck to you.”

  I never understood the tone that the machines liked to strike in their dealings with agents in the field. The consultant was about to ring off when I stopped her.

  “I don’t understand at all. What about my Six?”

  “Given what we see of the probabilities, considering the unfolding circumstances at the Agency, we need to extract you from the situation. I cannot release you to pursue your leads.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Agent Eleven, we agreed that if you asked, we would convey an additional piece of information. We would have preferred to delay until psychiatric adjustment was available to you. I have confirmation that not more than a few minutes ago in your frame of reference, in a greenhouse located in the Menara Gardens, Agent Six took the black pill. She is as much a part of the present as the past.”

  “Of the future as the present.”

  “And may her memory be our hope.”

  The familiar words didn’t help. I uttered them by rote, as I had said them at my mother’s graveside, and yet I didn’t believe them in my heart. I couldn’t believe what the consultant was telling me about my Six. Not even a calculating machine would be so unmoved by the death of a senior case officer in the field, unforeseen by the recording. Back at home there would be an inquiry.

  But I couldn’t afford to think about Shanumi for the moment. I concentrated instead on the practical problems of taking the blue pill; I would need some basic equipment if I was going to bury myself.

  The bellhop at the hotel assisted me. He was a young brown man in a gold-buttoned blazer, piping on the sleeves, the suggestion of wool on his cheeks, dark enough so that I felt comfortable talking to him in a corner. He didn’t blink an eye at what I wanted. He told me to follow him to the back.

  We went through the kitchen to the groundsman’s quarters outside of which a boy was sitting cross-legged on the Earth, diligently polishing brassware. The boy didn’t raise his head while the bellhop laid out various items for my consideration: a spade, tatty blue raincoat devoid of buttons, gumboots, and a tarpaulin cover. Everything I required.

  I didn’t have the heart to bargain him down as he expected. I counted out the money, in French francs. The bellhop counted the stack again, his fingers as fluent as a bank teller’s, and held some of the notes up to the lamp to check the watermark. Then he slid them into his buckled shoe, tied the tarpaulin around the spade, and held out the raincoat so that I could put it on. I took it over my arm instead.

  “You want hashish, sir?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I thought you might be German, sir. They usually want hashish.”

  “Do I look German?”

  “I can’t say who is German and who is not German, who is Austrian and who is not Austrian. It is not up to me to decide, sir. They can be black or they can be white, as they please.”

  I was in the lobby, passing the jeweler’s desk, before I had second thoughts.

  Carrying the raincoat on my arm, I went back through the kitchen where the bustle was immense. There were stripped rabbits on a board and plucked chicken carcasses pegged to a washing line, waiting to be plunged into the boiling pots below. The scent of cinnamon hung in the air. Trays were stacked on the near end, arriving from the dining room on a lazy Susan. The pastry cook was applying fronds of silver icing to a cake.

  I found the bellhop sitting on the outside step. He was bent over, steadily polishing his shoes.

  “So we can do some more business?” he asked.

  “It depends.”

  “You changed your mind about hashish, sir.”

  “Nothing at all to do with hashish.”

  I sat down next to him and put my hand on his back. We were about the same size.

  “You’re unhappy with your purchase. I am sorry, sir. I have already spent the money.”

  “Not that either. You said something strange before about the Germans and the Austrians. It struck me right afterwards.”

  “I said that it is not my business to decide who is German and who is Austrian.”

  “You get a lot of them? Visitors from Austria, Germany, Switzerland? If you were looking for someone from that region, who was right here in Marrakesh, where would you begin?”

  “You can put a notice in the German bakery. It’s next to the bar and restaurant. They also have a church there. I will draw you a map.” He produced an envelope and a pencil stub. “But it will be closed now. The bar might be open. Are you caught in a trap, sir?”

  I looked past the bellhop into the kitchen where pots were boiling ferociously, their sides almost touching, on the blackened, pig-iron stove. The cooks and waiters were too far away to hear us.

  “My friend, do you think you could find me some additional equipment?”

  The bellhop paused for an instant, but he didn’t hesitate. I noticed that his eyes were the exact shape of almonds. They looked away from you while you were talking and made you believe he was gazing into his own dream while you were lost in your own.

  “That depends what you mean by equipment, sir.”

  “I would like to be able to protect myself.”

  He shook his head and gave me the map. “I am sorry. It’s my responsibility not to put myself or any of our guests in danger.”

  In the Royal Bavarian Bakery, on a dead-end road in an industrial section of town, the lights were on, although nobody was in evidence behind the large plateglass windows.

  The taxi had long disappeared while I stood there and admired the hundreds of crammed baskets of bread on display. Around the bakery lingered the aroma of yeast.

  Next door, in the Green Dolphin Brewhouse—“Serving Since 1946”—the menu was printed in Arabic and German. There was activity long into the evening. Tables of men gathered around tall amber glasses and dishes of pretzels, pressing tobacco into their pipes.

  From a record player on the counter emerged a rueful woman’s voice, as if from a long-ago movie. At one of the tables sat a band of military policemen with flashes on their shoulders and revolvers in their holsters. They looked too thin to fit in their uniforms, with narrow chests and hips, and watched me in an unfriendly fashion.

  I sat in front of a carafe of tonic water, which fizzed unenthusiastically, and calculated the number of hours remaining before I had to take the tablet and stop my heart. I had wanted adventure. I had found something else: the small death. Under the table, the spade rested on my leg, a cold reminder of the future.

  I kept expecting to find Shanumi Six across the table, about to make some logical point that a junior case officer should know. The dream which had formed around me in Marrakesh was as insubstantial as a shadow in one minute, as if I could wish it away, and in the next minute as dark and deep as a well. I stayed there for an hour, muttering to myself, as more men came in and took their chairs. The new arrivals contended good-naturedly with the bartender, played backgammon, or simply stared
into their glasses.

  People who don’t risk their own skins in the field pose the usual paradoxes, commonplaces that have caused nothing but confusion since Zeno of Elea proved motion is impossible and time an illusion. In my opinion, those questions are useless. Certain paradoxes, the useful ones, address the heart instead of the mind. A case officer is a shadow chasing a shadow, the shadow of the future intersecting with the shadow of the past. If she dies in a foreign location, she is a shadow of a shadow. I was so disturbed at the thought, which was almost as distasteful as the travesty of a multiverse, that I stood up in the middle of the Green Dolphin.

  In the same moment, I heard the voice from the warehouse. When I turned around, shielding my face with one hand, I saw that Keswyn Muller was at the next table. He was sitting opposite a young woman and entertaining her with a story. Smiling broadly, as if he had won a competition, he took out a fountain pen and drew a map on a coaster. For an instant I thought that the trap had closed on me, until I assured myself that he would have no idea of how I looked.

  The woman was around my age, or no more than a few years older, and had her brown hair in a low bun. She was wearing long earrings, out of place in the Green Dolphin, and a narrowly tailored jacket with a rose-lettered blouse. Her legs, under the table, were bare from the knee. Her complexion was fair, by the standards of civilization, and yet I experienced no horror. There was no discomfort, no sense of repulsion from what God and man had made ugly. The opposite. The more I watched, the more I realized that she was very beautiful, a sign whose meaning became clearer and yet farther away in the darkness of the room.

  I sat down and tried to move my chair gradually backwards, closer to their conversation. My heart was beating so loudly I almost couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  “It was too good to be true, my dear. I couldn’t believe our luck.”

  “To have the chance to ask one of them questions?”

  “In the entire correspondence of the Board, there has not been one occasion on which we had a chance to interact with one of them on our terms. We believed they had supernatural powers, as if they could control every detail of physics and chemistry in pursuit of their depraved agenda. Now we can see they are mere fanatics. The value of life means nothing to them. We have finally exposed them to the world and there will be no turning back.”

  My ears burned. I had never heard anyone speak of the Agency with such vehemence. I leant back in the chair, hoping not to fall over.

  “Are you sure she intended to kill herself? Even a fanatic—”

  “Even the fact that they use women as their sacrificial victims. She burnt to death before my very eyes. It took ninety seconds from start to finish. At the end, there wasn’t even a shoelace left. Spontaneous human combustion. The myth comes to life, or rather to death. You should have seen the expression in this black-skinned woman’s eyes, my dearest Soledad, looking out of the blaze as she was consumed. I have not witnessed scenes of this kind since the last days of Berlin.”

  She poured two glasses of wine. “You want to pack up tonight?”

  “We have our passports. We have sufficient money. We still exist, as far as such a thing can be known.” He pinched her arm sourly. “So we will elude them if it is humanly possible. In their flippant way, when their interests are threatened, they are quite ruthless about reversing the verdict of history, especially since we can trace the loss of an innocent woman’s life back to them. If they identify us under our true names and trace our ancestry then you know all too well what will follow. They will make it as if not a single member of the Board had ever been born. You will be gone, just like that, my dear Soledad, but you will have no parents either, no brother, no sister, no relations up to the second degree.”

  It took a minute to realize Muller had turned his chair in my direction, as if to address me directly. He moved his chair closer, and closer, and then took me by the ear. His hand was cruel.

  “It seems that someone has long ears.”

  His strength was extraordinary. He turned my chair around, never letting go of my ear, so that we were sitting face-to-face.

  The rise and fall of conversation continued around us. Beer hissed out of the tap into the glasses which the bartender removed to the trays. The door opened to admit two men who joined the policemen at their table. Every soul in old Morocco could have been on the far side of the planet for whatever help they could render me. I had never feared anyone so much or resented the touch of a man’s hand, as stern as the lid of a trap. Where I had descended, led by the ear like Cerberus the dog, there was only pale-faced Dr. Muller and myself, and the stare of his companion. She was more beautiful than I had recognized. Her complexion was the color of a certain wood.

  “Do you understand German, my friend?”

  I didn’t reply. I was overwhelmed by fear and expectation. Scarcely two hours remained before my rendezvous with the small death. I hadn’t yet found a safe place, and I was in the hands of an enemy. I put a hand on the spade, wondering if I should hit Muller in the head, but then he let me go. He continued in Arabic:

  “You people are very curious in this country. Nobody knows how to mind his own business. What is your name, my friend?”

  “Enver.”

  “Are you from around here, Enver?”

  “Skoura. In the mountains. Far away.”

  Muller settled back in his chair. “Skoura. You don’t look quite Moroccan. Sudanese, in my opinion. A black devil. May I ask what you are doing, my inquisitive friend, so far from home, in Marrakesh?”

  “I sell electrical equipment. Voltage converters and transformers. I am here to find customers. On the other end I buy from Siemens, my main suppliers. Their engineers taught me a few words of German.”

  “Did you understand anything?”

  “Not a word. I am disappointed.”

  I could have mentioned the names of my imaginary father’s cousins, electricians in Skoura, who had been involved in a lengthy feud. I could have provided a bank account for the company and the names of its customers. I knew the results of every soccer game in the region past and future, and could have made a fortune gambling if I hadn’t renounced betting, not to say the benefits of compound interest, as a condition of service.

  Dr. Muller turned the wine bottle around, showing me the yellow label. It was in French. “You would like a drink?”

  “After an introduction like that, you want to drink with me?”

  “I would like the chance to apologize. In my line of work I have to be careful, Enver.” He put his hand against the wall. “In England they have an expression—they say that the walls have their ears.”

  What might I have done? I might have killed Keswyn Muller in the corner of the Green Dolphin, using the side of a broken bottle. I might have slipped a black pill into his wine glass, strangled him at the urinal. I might have set fire to his body, disposed of the remains in a dune ten miles out of Marrakesh, attended by the wild rush of stars in the sky and the cries of bush dogs.

  As a case officer, however, I was trained to do the opposite, to tread lightly as possible, to follow the traces which might lead us in the direction of the hidden enemy. I could settle accounts with Muller later. Next time I saw him I would make sure to have constitutional clearance in hand, not to say the permission of the three equations, and the weird nod of the consultants when they smiled on our suggestions.

  Muller introduced me to his companion, Soledad. He filled and refilled our glasses without asking. Soledad wasn’t his daughter or wife, as I had assumed, but the assistant in his organization. She hadn’t appeared in the recordings, so I wasn’t familiar with her background other than what she told me across the table. She was a geologist, born in Brazil in Minas Gerais, educated at a technical institute in Berlin. Soledad’s eyes were as black as charcoal. Her accent was neutral and her name was Spanish more than Portuguese.

 
I couldn’t find out more about her, however, because Muller kept asking me questions about specific pieces of electrical equipment he wanted to obtain. Their tolerances. Their costs. Their range of dependencies and outputs.

  At first I had the impression Muller was supercilious, but he became warmer and more familiar as the minutes wore on and I passed his tests. I watched the clock out of the corner of my eye.

  “Are you an engineer, Dr. Muller?”

  “Not exactly. But I have problems to solve which require a certain amount of engineering.”

  “Why do you try to solve them in Morocco? There is not much industry here, from an international point of view. Even Egypt would be better if you want mechanical parts, electrical components, and such. They have developed a very good industrial base.”

  “I am starting to ask myself this very question, Enver.”

  I calculated that I had twenty minutes to get out of the Green Dolphin. That left no more than an hour to find a good location. The graveyard was a possibility. Otherwise, an abandoned mine, somewhere the Earth might lie undisturbed. In a pinch, a building site where the foundations had been poured. I couldn’t delay.

  At the same time, I wanted to put something more in my report than casual conversation. I wanted to understand his motivations, not merely in my role as a case officer but as a human being who had lost something.

  “Is there something you’re looking for in Morocco? Is it something here I can help you to find? I would be only too happy to put my contacts at your disposal.”

  Muller’s expression tightened. He poured the remainder of the bottle into my glass. He ran his fingers along the side of the table, as if he were deciding to wager a sum of money. “You are a very curious man, Enver.”