Casablanca Blues (2013) (15 page)

‘Go take a hot shower,’ Ghita replied, ‘and you’ll feel a lot better.’

Blaine sighed.

‘OK.’

Fifteen minutes later he was scrubbed clean, with a lavender-coloured bath towel wrapped around his waist. He padded through into the sitting-room, and hunted through his bin-liner for the cleanest dirty shirt, smelling them one by one.

All of a sudden he stopped, put the plastic sack down and picked up his satchel, as if in urgent need to check something.

‘Oh my God!’ he yelled, his hands tearing fast through odds and ends. ‘It was in here last night, I
know
it was!’

‘What was?’

‘My passport! Jesus! I don’t believe it!’

Standing over in the kitchen area, Ghita slipped a coffee capsule into the Nespresso machine and pressed the button.

‘I’m sure it’s there,’ she said over the whirring sound.

‘No, no, it’s not!’

‘Did you leave it at Hotel Marrakech?’

‘No, I brought it with me. I know I did! It was right here, in this little pouch.’

‘You must have dropped it on the way over. We could retrace your steps.’

Blaine screwed up his face.

‘Do you really think anyone would leave an American passport where it was if they found it on the street? Anyway, I trudged around for hours before coming here. All I can do is to go to the consulate and plead for my life.’

Ghita hurried over.

‘I warn you against going to the authorities,
any
authorities,’ she said. ‘The police commissioner is the only one who can help you.’

‘And he’s
not
the authorities?’

Ghita stuck out a hand and nudged it side to side.

‘There’s authorities and there’s authorities,’ she said hesitantly. ‘And he’s the right kind of authorities. He can help you.’

‘You mean, he can help
us
?’

Sixty-six

On the strike of noon, twenty police vans rolled up fast to the main entrance of the Globalcom HQ. A stream of officers poured out, and took up positions all around the building. More still marched inside, and set about shutting Globalcom down.

Patricia Ross had known it was only a matter of time before the Governor and his cronies would attack. She had loaded the secret dossiers onto numerous websites, hosted all around the world. They were timed to reveal another document every five minutes, playing out the scandal a little at a time.

Omary would be proud of her, she thought, after all it had been he who had taught her to allow a news story to develop – the snowball effect.

By thirty-five minutes past the hour, Ross and her colleagues were down on the forecourt. Their hands tied with nylon straps, they awaited processing at the police headquarters on Boulevard Zerktouni.

Behind them, a mass of computer hard drives, plastic files, and assorted paperwork, was shuffled out of the building towards a fleet of waiting vans.

In other jurisdictions the emphasis might have been on sifting through the mountain of data. But, in Casablanca, sifting data was the lowest priority.

The files and the hard drives were instead headed straight to the incinerator.

Sixty-seven

Blaine dared not leave the apartment until the late afternoon.

At eleven, Ghita had slipped out on an errand, leaving him to brood there alone. When she was gone, he sat on the couch, consumed with worry and with fear.

For hours he sat there, rigid like a statue.

He thought about his life in New York, about Laurie, and about Drain-O-Sure, one of a hundred dead-end sales jobs that had sucked him in and spat him out.

Then his thoughts turned to Bogart.

A man with his own demons, he’d been a role model to a generation, a pillar of strength and an idol – the kind of man who guffawed in the face of adversity.

‘Damn it!’ said Blaine angrily. ‘What would Bogie think of me, cowering here like this? I can’t hide in here forever. If I’m going to survive the real Casablanca, I’m gonna have to learn to fight back!’

Pulling on his mackintosh and fedora, Blaine took a good hard look at the postcard. Despite the almost illegible script, the directions were just about clear enough.

They led to a bar opposite the Cinema Lynx in nearby Mers Sultan.

Within the hour, Blaine found himself outside Bar Atomic, a haunt of impecunious drinkers, dating back to the ’thirties, when anything with the word ‘Atomic’ in the title was regarded as cutting edge and cool.

The doors were open, the panelled saloon pleasing in its size and shape, with a bar on one side running the length of the room. The walls were hung with old studio prints of Hollywood greats – Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney and, of course, Humphrey Bogart in trademark
Casablanca
attire.

Behind the bar there were a pair of antique wooden refrigerators, the wall above them peppered with enamelled advertisements – among them, Cinzano, Campari and Ricard.

And between the bar and the back wall lay a hotchpotch of battered tables and chairs, a handful of regulars sitting in silence, with their beers and cigarettes.

Blaine took a seat in the corner and soaked up the atmosphere.

A moment or two passed, and then the crusty old barman crept over, doling out green bottles of Flag and ashtrays as he came. He handed Blaine a bottle, wiping the rim of a glass clean on his sleeve.

Every now and then a salesman coursed in as if swept through on the tide.

The first one sold peanuts from a shallow wicker tray. The second offered bras in assorted sizes and colours. And the third was touting all manner of goods – from can openers to bottle cleaners, to oversized dusters fashioned in the shape of the Eiffel Tower.

When the last of the salesmen had washed away, Blaine took out the postcard and, hesitant as to quite where to start, held it up between thumb and forefinger.

‘A friend gave me this,’ he explained to the barman. ‘And it led me here.’

The barman combed a hand back over his hairless head. He frowned, his brow furrowing like a fallow field. Without a word, he returned to the bar, picked out a clutch of fresh bottles from the fridge and dished them out, whether anyone had asked for refills or not.

Nearing the American, he seemed to stoop.

‘Come with me, Monsieur,’ he whispered.

Blaine stood up, and followed the barman through saloon-style swing doors into the toilet. Even by Casablanca’s atrocious standards, it was a deplorable place. An advanced case of rising damp had taken hold on every surface. The single squat lavatory was cracked down the middle, as though an enormous weight had been dropped onto it at some time in the past.

The barman pressed a hand to his chin.

‘We have waited,’ he said.

‘Waited for what?’

‘For this moment, for this day.’

‘I’m not exactly sure what this is all about,’ Blaine replied.

The barman pointed to the postcard, to Humphrey Bogart’s script.

‘It’s about that.’

‘I know, but what exactly about it?’

His old hands trembling, the barman unclipped an enamelled advertisement for Schweppes Tonic that was hanging above the urinal. Then he picked out a cardboard envelope from the niche behind.

It was mottled with damp and dirt.

‘Here it is.’

‘What is it?’

The barman seemed confused.

‘It’s what you came for,’ he said.

Sixty-eight

The slim wiry body of Mortimer Wu had been taken away by the police. His possessions and the blood-soaked bedclothes were removed too, confiscated as evidence.

After that, the clerk was arrested as a suspect, although he was later released. The only other guest at the hotel was a Slovak in search of a Sufi brotherhood. He had planned to hitch-hike eastward to Figuig to join a fraternity there, but found himself locked up in an interrogation cell instead.

The clerk had considered it strange that the American might have disappeared at the time of Wu’s death, especially when he noticed that he had left his precious poster behind.

But Blaine Williams had been friendly to the cats. And, as a cat-lover like himself, the clerk thought it unlikely that he could have committed such an act of brutality.

Late in the afternoon, he poured an extra large bowl of cream and laid it on the floor in the usual spot. Still spooked, most of the cats refused to come down from their perches.

At five minutes to five, a stout man with a Marrakchi accent, a dark complexion and heavily scarred cheeks, forced the hotel’s front door open. His voice was coarse, his eyes intensely cold. Even before he had uttered a word, the clerk had guessed who he was.

‘The body?’ the man asked, severely.

‘Taken, by the police, along with his luggage.’

‘He had something that belonged to us, something valuable.’

The clerk dared not ask what it was.

‘You can go up and check the room,’ he said.

The Marrakchi went up. He didn’t need to be told in which room to look, as though he had experience in tracking down the scent of death.

The clerk could make out the sound of floorboards being jemmied up, and the rickety furniture being torn apart.

When he came back down, the Marrakchi looked at the guest register.

‘Where is this one, this American?’

‘Which?’

‘This one... Monsieur Blaine... Blaine Williams?’

‘He left.’

‘When?’

‘Just before...’

‘
When
?’

‘Just before Mr. Wu did,’ the clerk said.

Sixty-nine

Blaine covered the half-mile from Mers Sultan at a slow pace.

His mind was on the hardback envelope tucked away in his breast pocket, as much as it was on the mental freeze-frame of Mortimer Wu lying there, all lifeless and drenched in blood.

He planned to head back to Ghita’s apartment and to open the envelope there. But the closer he got to the building, the more he wondered about her.

All of a sudden, Blaine thought of his grandfather.

He was sitting on his porch slurping ice tea through his gleaming white dentures.

‘Don’t trust her!’ the old man barked. ‘That girl’s nothing but trouble!’

So Blaine crossed the street and threaded his way through Derb Omar. The textile merchants were closing up for the night, packing away the great bolts of cloth, donkey carts hauling off the mountains of discarded packaging. He passed the Rialto, and Le Petit Poucet, and was about to drop in on Monsieur Raffi, when he heard footsteps behind him.

They were coming fast, in a sprint.

Blaine turned sharply.

A plump, dark man in a thick winter coat was running straight towards him, his right hand outstretched, the fingers clutching the hilt of a knife.

Without thinking, Blaine ran – like he had never run before.

Up Mohammed V, and then doubling back fast in the adjacent street.

The figure followed, and was closing in.

Blaine made a left turn back onto the main drag, then darted down the dimly lit Passage Gallinari, a stone’s throw from the Marché Central.

He charged down to the end, to where the hookers gathered when it rained. The footsteps had paused at the passage entrance, as though unsure which way to go.

Suddenly Blaine felt a hand grab the collar of his coat. It yanked him back hard towards a doorway, catching him off balance.

He fell, panting, cursing, hands protecting his head.

‘Stay down there!’ said a voice. ‘I think you’ve escaped him.’

Blaine looked up. He got to his feet.

‘Saed?’ he stuttered, still panting from the run. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Saving you. That’s what I am doing,’ he said.

Seventy

Up on the fourth floor, Blaine took the shoeshine boy through the wardrobe into Ghita’s secret world. He might not have trusted her, but options were limited. And she had trusted him with a key.

Once inside, he went straight over to the counter, poured himself a Grey Goose, and slugged it back in one.

‘Why does she hide...?’ asked Saed, dazed by the luxury.

‘It’s something about proving herself to her father.’ Blaine paused, poured another vodka. ‘If you ask me, she’s a complete nutcase.’

He sat on the couch, fingertips pressed together at his chin.

‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ he said. ‘Who was that guy – a mugger?’

Saed helped himself to a neat Grey Goose, then another.

‘An assassin. But not one from Casa,’ he said casually.

Blaine looked up.

‘You think he killed the backpacker?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what does he want?’

‘I do not know. But he thinks you have it.’

‘Have what?’

‘The thing he wants.’

The shoeshine boy’s ever-ready smile melted away.

‘I need to ask something from you... a favour,’ he said.

Blaine felt a tinge of apprehension in the pit of his stomach, as though a demand for funds was about to be forthcoming.

‘A favour?’ he repeated in a slow dry voice.

‘This looks like a safe place – a secret safe place,’ Saed said.

‘Yeah...’

‘Could you keep something for me, for a few days?’

The American breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Sure... although I’m a guest of Ghita’s sofa, an invited guest.’

Saed pulled up his tee-shirt and unzipped a money-belt. Inside it were a collection of random credit cards, foreign currency bills, and an envelope with what looked like Chinese handwriting on the front.

‘Will you keep this envelope for me?’ he asked. ‘The police stop me very often...’

‘You don’t have to explain.’

Blaine took the envelope and slipped it into his satchel.

The sight of it reminded him of the treasure trail that had ended at Bar Atomic. He went over to his coat, pulled out the dirt-speckled envelope and opened it.

There was another postcard inside.

It bore the black and white image of a sleek open-topped limousine. Rising up behind it was the Shell Petroleum headquarters at the top of the old Avenue de France.

As with the first postcard, the reverse side was blank. And, as before, Blaine peeled back the photograph, revealing Bogie’s spidery hand.