Casablanca Blues (2013) (28 page)

The consul nodded.

‘So I understand.’

‘What was the fragment of information... the one entrusted to you?’

‘That one day, someone might turn up and claim the lost treasure of Humphrey Bogart.’

Blaine broke into a grin.

‘What is it, a bottle of Scotch?’

The consul shrugged.

‘I don’t know. But I have a sense that we are about to find out.’

One hundred and ten

The boots echoed down the stone corridor, waking Hicham Omary from a light sleep. He recognized the feet inside them instantly as those of his nemesis, Bruiser.

Following Ghita’s break-in, Omary had fallen into a gloom of terrible despondency. He was losing weight fast, and his bones ached. Were he not so stubborn, he might have regretted ever taking on the system.

Standing in the darkness, he coaxed himself to be strong.

First came the keys rattling on their chain, then the sound of the lock mechanism turning, and hinges creaking open.

And then a tidal wave of blinding light.

‘Turn around!’ ordered Bruiser, striking Omary’s shoulder with his cane. ‘Hands behind your back.’

The prisoner crossed his wrists, and waited for the nickel-plated handcuffs. But they didn’t come. Instead, a pair of rusted old D-lock cuffs were slammed over his wrists and locked twice.

Omary may not have seen them, but he could feel the difference. They were colder, tighter, and somehow far more fearful than simple self-locking handcuffs.

Then came the fetters and a blindfold made from extra-thick hessian. Like the cuffs, they were different, too.

By the time he was led out from his cell, it was clear that Omary was not en route to the interrogation cell.

‘What’s happening?’

‘You’re being moved,’ said Bruiser.

‘Where to?’

‘Do you want me to ruin the surprise?’ he said.

One hundred and eleven

George Sanderson disappeared into the back office and was gone a long time.

When finally he reappeared, he was clutching a tan-coloured dossier. It looked extremely old, the faded binding covered in dust and speckled with damp.

In small neat script on the front was the number: 07698.

The consul placed the folder on the table, blew away the dust, then opened it slowly.

Inside were a series of letters and photographs, most of them showing Bogart and his wife performing for the troops. The consul shuffled through the papers, his forehead knotted in concentration.

‘What is it you’re looking for?’ asked Blaine.

Sanderson didn’t reply, not at first.

Then, after a minute or two, he pulled out an envelope. It was labelled 07698, and was pasted shut, Bogart’s signature scrawled over the seal.

‘The plot thickens,’ he said, as he drew the blade of a letter-opener down the side.

Blaine leaned closer to get a better look.

‘Is it a letter?’

The consul removed the single sheet of paper, the crest of the United States embossed on the top. Holding it between his hands, he rotated it clockwise.

‘It’s a map,’ he said.

‘To the Scotch?’

As before, Sanderson didn’t reply.

Instead, he paced out of the room and gave an inaudible instruction to the maid. A few minutes later, one of the guards from the front gate was standing in the doorway of the room. He was holding a shovel.

‘Let’s go outside,’ said the consul.

‘You think it’s buried here somewhere?’

‘Look at the map. The house is here, and the terrace there. This line is the curve of the garden wall, and that’s the tall palm there. It just wasn’t quite so tall when this plan was drawn.’

‘And that?’ asked Blaine, pointing to a circle bisected with a line.

‘That’s what we’re searching for, I guess.’

Counting fifteen paces from the edge of the terrace, and twenty-two from the wall, they found themselves at the sundial.

‘It must be under here,’ said Blaine.

Using all his strength, the guard pulled away the dial and began to dig.

Ten minutes later there was a little mound of dark brown soil, and a hole two feet deep beside it.

Suddenly, the shovel hit something hard.

‘It sounds like wood,’ said Sanderson.

The guard speeded up, his face streaming with sweat. Carefully, he dug around the sides of what appeared to be a casket.

He lifted it out onto the lawn.

Fastened with a pair of rusted iron padlocks, the wood was overlaid with curious metallic motifs.

The guard brushed off the dirt and, when instructed to do so, knocked off the locks with the shovel.

‘Are you ready?’ Sanderson asked.

‘Couldn’t be more so,’ replied Blaine.

The curved lid was pulled back, the hinges so rusted that they needed force to part them.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said the consul.

‘It looks like another box.’

‘It’s made of metal.’

‘I think it’s lead.’

They lifted it out, and unfastened its clasp.

Inside it was a third box, also made from lead, but this time reinforced with a thin layer of wood.

Blaine opened it, to find a package the size and weight of a telephone directory.

‘The treasure?’

‘Not whisky after all.’

Sanderson carried it inside and led the way through to the main reception room.

On one side there was an antique Érard grand. Across from it was a fireplace, and a group of formal chairs.

The packet was put on the coffee table and opened up.

It contained something wrapped in a long strand of discoloured muslin.

Blaine unwound it inch by inch.

Inside was a book, handwritten Arabic in the elegant Maghrebi style of centuries ago. It was not bound, but rather enveloped in a sheet of coarse goatskin.

Turning it over in his hands so that the spine was on the right, Blaine pulled the covers apart. His eyes focused on the now familiar script of Humphrey Bogart, a line or two of text inserted on a loose sheet.

‘Can you read his writing?’

Blaine held it to the light.

‘
I was presented this down in the desert by a fellow chess player, who made sure I couldn’t read it before he passed it on. I leave African shores shortly and have decided that it belongs here on the Dark Continent, a prize for the man who can make sense of my trail – Humphrey Bogart
.’

The consul flicked through the pages. A great many were inscribed with mathematical diagrams and symbols.

‘It looks like witchcraft,’ he said. Getting to his feet, he tramped through to the kitchen.

A moment later he returned, followed by the maid. He tapped a finger towards Bogart’s treasure.

‘Zeinab, can you read any of this?’

The maid opened the book at the title page. Her face froze and she began to whimper, a whimper that quickly turned into a high-pitched scream.

‘What is it?’ asked Blaine urgently. ‘What’s so frightening?’

‘You must bury this book and never think of it again!’ Zeinab exclaimed, hyperventilating.

‘But why?’

‘Because it is a pact with the Devil!’ she said.

One hundred and twelve

Ghita took a taxi to C.I.L., one of the old French quarters patronized by the city’s bourgeoisie.

There were no designer clothes shops there or little boutiques selling jewellery or shoes, but there was something far more in demand by the jet-set ladies from Anfa – Chez Louche.

An extrovert of the most sensual nature, coutured from neck to toe in pink satin, Laurent Louche was the most sought-after man in town. His clients booked weeks and, sometimes, months in advance, to be pampered and pored over in his salon. An appointment at Louche was an entrance ticket into the most exclusive of sororities. Merely being seen in the salon was in itself a mark that one had arrived.

Laurent Louche specialized in obscure beauty treatments, the kinds that only ladies with abundant free time and extraordinary wealth could afford. These included caviar facials, and gold leaf face masks, bull semen hair treatments and even snake massage.

The more extreme, the higher the price, and the more the clientele demanded them.

Ghita had dressed up in a profusion of couture, pieces that had not enjoyed any takers on the streets downtown. Her scarf was by Fendi, and her dress by Chanel, the hat a Fleur de Paris creation, and the belt was Hermès. A gift from Ghita’s father, it was far too precious to sell, even by a spiteful daughter.

Unlike the Ghita Omary of old, she now felt self-conscious at being so overdressed. But she knew very well that the only way to be taken seriously at Chez Louche was to be way over the top.

Swaggering towards the entrance, she allowed the pair of towering Nubian guards to pull the doors apart, while the Chinese dwarf attendant scattered rose petals at her feet. More importantly though, she made an effort to appear completely nonchalant and bored by it all, as if she had seen it a thousand times before – which of course she had.

Her foot hadn’t taken a single step through into the leopard-skin interior when Laurent Louche himself waddled up and air-kissed Ghita’s cheeks.

‘My darling!’ he swooned. ‘Where
have
you been? I have been worried sick about you!’

‘Monaco,’ Ghita replied conceitedly. ‘But it is so tiresome in winter. You know how it is.’

‘So drab,’ screamed Laurent. He gave a snigger. ‘But who has been doing your hair my darling? Not that monkey at the Salon Mustique?’

He snapped his fingers and a gaggle of fledgling attendants slipped out from crevices. Dancing around her with garlands and scattering yet more petals, they directed Ghita to a throne-like seat, and the business of beautifying began.

Laurent himself swanned about, fussing over his clientele, he lavished superlatives, and his own inimitable wisdom.

‘You must leave him, but only after taking him for every penny he’s got,’ he told a pretty Italian woman dressed in pea-green silk. And he said to another: ‘What do you think beauty is for, if not as a tool to get what you want from a man?’

One of the reasons that Chez Louche was such a financial success was that its proprietor decided what treatment he would administer to each woman who came through the door. He would not have dreamt of allowing them to decide for themselves.

By rationing the most expensive techniques, he created an insatiable demand. A day didn’t go by without a craggy matriarch from the good side of Anfa begging for one of the more extravagant procedures, and being turned away.

A team of fourteen staff laboured at the throne on which Ghita perched, a glass of chilled vintage Krug in her hand.

After forty minutes, Laurent Louche glided up with an antique mirror. It had once been owned by the English mistress of Napoleon III. He held the glass to Ghita’s face.

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’ he giggled.

‘You work wonders my darling,’ she said.

Louche blushed, and fell at her knees, his lips pressed gently to the back of her hand.

Choosing the moment, Ghita looked into Laurent’s eyes and blew him a kiss.

‘I have a favour to ask you, my dearest,’ she said.

‘If it’s not a big one I shall be cross.’

‘I feel awful at asking anything of you at all,’ Ghita said, moistening her lips with champagne.

Laurent Louche tapped a fingertip to his ear.

‘Whisper in here my darling,’ he said, ‘and your wish shall be my command.’

One hundred and thirteen

Uncertain quite what to do with Bogart’s treasure, Blaine took it back to the secret apartment and hid it in his satchel.

The fact that Ghita had solicited services from the witches of Sidi Abdur Rahman suggested she might be unnerved at the thought of having a black-magic manuscript in her home.

The American was about to put the satchel on the shelf in the hallway, when something caught his eye.

The bottom edge of the bag had a small tear along it, where the two main seams joined. He didn’t remember ever noticing it before. Taking it through to the window, he prised the two seams apart. Strange, he thought, it’s out of shape. Without thinking, he delved his fingers into the hole.

A moment later he was holding a booklet.

Its cover was red, adorned with a globe, olive branches, and the words ‘United Nations Laissez-Passer’.

One hundred and fourteen

The prison van was constructed from armoured steel, the kind used in bullion trucks. It had a bullet-proof glass windscreen, and a sealed compartment for the convict. There was even a spray nozzle mounted on the ceiling, through which nerve gas could be piped in the event of an attempted break-out.

The van made its way through the gauntlet of security checks, but never once were the doors opened, for fear that the prisoner would try to escape.

Hicham Omary spent the entire journey crouched on the floor, his hands still cuffed behind his back. Thankfully, the blindfold had been untied at the last minute, before he was loaded in.

For the move, Omary had been dressed in fluorescent orange overalls. In the unlikely event he managed an escape, it would be easier for a sniper to spot him and to bring him down.

But escape was the last thing occupying Omary’s thoughts.

Incarceration had taught him to mind-wander. Staring at a fixed point on the floor or the wall, he would begin the spiral down through layers of interwoven memory. The technique tended to take him to the bedrock of his youth, played out in the carefree streets of Casablanca’s downtown.

All of a sudden he was playing marbles in the dust.

There were three of them – Adil, Hassan and he. For an entire summer they spent almost every minute together. How old could they have been?

Omary squinted to see the detail.
Seven
?
Eight
?

They always went to the same place – a disused cinema across from the old Christian church, not far from the Hyatt. Through that long scorching summer they had made it their den.

They called it
Dar Majnoun
, ‘House of the Possessed’.

Sometimes they used to rip up the floorboards and set fire to them, or smoke cigarettes cadged from the old winos in the nearby bars, or scrawl their names on the walls with sticks blackened in the fire.