Lulu in Marrakech (26 page)

“It’s as we thought—you’ve probably known all along,” said Marina, with a note of reproach that we’d been holding out on them.

“George had a visit from the Saudi ambassador,” said Neil. “My word, intervention at the ambassadorial level! Complaining about Ian on behalf of Khaled Al‐Sayad. About Ian having gone off with his wife. It seems he’s jolly ticked off. Ian eloped with Gazi Al‐Sayad! You must have known all along!”

We were silent a few seconds, people I suppose wondering what to say in front of me.

“Yes, he seems to be involved in rescuing Gazi,” Robin said. “She took asylum here. We were locked down in an atmosphere of utter secrecy.” The Cotters continued to look at us reproachfully.

“George had been looking everywhere for Ian—trying his office and such, wondered if I knew anything. I said, ‘not a thing.’” Again, the faint note of reproach for having kept him and Marina in the dark in this cruel way.

“In Saudi Arabia, it seems these things are managed with—if not death by stoning, then a payment of goats at least. Sheep? Camels? Reparations of some kind. In Khaled’s case, he apparently would accept money. He’s trying to do the modern, Western thing. This is what George told me.”

“It’s delicious, in a way, but—” Marina stopped, probably thinking of me. “Does it really help them, their women being educated in England and America? I think it just confuses them.”

“I’m not sure it’s cultural confusion—it’s old-fashioned lust. Gazi is very beautiful,” Neil said.

“In a Semitic, overblown way, I suppose,” Marina conceded. Robin said, as if to change the subject from their tactless allusions to Gazi’s beauty in front of me, “If Ian doesn’t turn up soon, I suppose we should ask Lord Drumm what we should do about things around here.” It was the first I realized that Robin might like me, to be so caring of my feelings. Usually I felt myself as invisible to him as Posy was.

“Ian isn’t dead, Robin,” I said.

“Still, it would be useful to know what the time frame is.”

“The long and short of it is,” said Neil, “a British subject has robbed a Saudi of his wife—that is the nature of it: a diplomatic incident! Well, we know what we know.”

“What did you say to Sir George?”

“I said I didn’t know anything about it. True enough, as far as that goes, though a half truth, since we knew Ian had vanished.” They went on hashing this over. News of it had spread everywhere in the English community and probably among the French: Ian had run off with a Saudi wife.

“Some say we shouldn’t interfere in Muslim marital affairs, but I defend Ian,” Marina said. “She was obviously desperate to get away. He had no choice but to help her. We saw them socially, after all. We sent them Suma. I wonder if it was a question of a second wife.”

Eventually I pleaded my illness, excused myself, and went upstairs, followed by their sympathetic glances.

40

How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed! The stones of the sanctuary are poured out in the top of every street.

—Lamentations 4:1

H
ow repetitious these protestations of dismay of mine! Yet it seemed there would be no end to new demonstrations of my misjudgment and culpability.

“Lulu, do you think Ian would object if we had a few people in tonight?” Pierre had said as I left the lunch table. “I’ve asked a few people over.”

I said I was sure it would be fine and went up again to my room, feeling sicker than ever and sure it was all in my head. In my room, I e‐mailed “Sheila” and telephoned the colonel: Somehow we would have to find that little girl. Really, I had no confidence we could. At one point during the evening, I dressed and tottered downstairs to look at the party I could hear going on. There was Pierre handing around a plate of something—hash brownies, judging from the expressions of the people helping themselves.

The atmosphere of frivolous sin did reinforce my impression that everyone I had met at the boozy but otherwise staid occasions (Europe an and Moroccan both) in Marrakech was here in the thrall of some unacknowledged vice or taste practiced outside of my view. For that matter, this had been my whole life experience, to radiate some inadvertent primness, to be sheltered from what everyone else knew, me only noticing belatedly, if ever, the hanky‐panky to which everyone else was drawn as horses to water. Alas, this credulity was not a good profile for someone in my profession, and, for that matter, may explain why I was drawn to it, in compensation, seeking the feeling of being for once in the know. Here were the clank of ice cubes; animated music in the French‐Moroccan idiom; strong smells of grass and whiskey, patchouli, sandalwood; light young voices speaking Arabic; a steady underlying drumbeat accelerating the pulse; couples, mostly male, draped in corners and on sofas; a few rather hard-looking European women; servants I’d never seen before passing drinks. Here was Robin Crumley, alone, his wife and new baby still in the hospital, standing pale and slightly boiled-looking, goofily waving his glass amid a crowd of dark young men, declaiming, I believed it was Yeats.

There’s something almost enjoyable about a scene of depravity, for the feeling it gives of being in the know, even though the real depravity is happening somewhere else offstage. Hypocrisy is another matter. That seems omnipresent. It also came to me again what doubtless other people have always known, that Islam like other religions has its share of the worst people masquerading as the best. Muslims took the same amount of dope as others and sold children into prostitution the same as in Thailand or Bucharest.

An odd moment: Into the party came George Ward, the British consul, wearing a white suit, though we were in winter, and an astonished expression as he beheld this transformation of Ian’s tranquil living room. People lounged, smoking; two boys stood up to dance in a jitterbug fashion I associated with 1950s films, people pushing and catching each other and twirling around to “Jail house Rock” played rather fast. The drums became deafening.

He made a beeline for Robin Crumley, they spoke a minute, and he left, obviously not there for the revelry.

Next, just as I was thinking, What if Ian came home now, Ian did come home—walked into the hall carrying a small suitcase. I wondered if he had met Sir George in the courtyard.

“Ah,” he said, fascinated, peering into the salon at the festive guests. He soon seemed more or less pleased that people like Pierre felt enough at home here to invite others—not disturbed, anyhow— and wore a bemused, welcoming expression, like someone returned from the dead to watch mortals frolic. I hurried over to welcome him; I wanted him to know I was forgiving him for his leaving me at the concert—and what ever else he had been up to in the ensuing days.

“We’ve missed you,” I said, striving for a light tone.

“Hello there. I was in Spain.” He didn’t kiss me.

“Where’s Gazi?”

“In Marbella. I’ll tell you about it, but I’ll take my stuff up.” He nodded at Pierre, whose eye he caught, and went off upstairs with his suitcase. I went up in a minute, not especially to be following him, just wanting to lie back down, still feverish, and unprepared for how happy I was to see him and for the swell of dependence, the feeling of wanting to dump everything in his lap, a feeling I couldn’t indulge. I felt again what a burden it is to have the poisonous and omnipresent weight of a seriously guilty secret. Maybe it was truly Amid who was making me ill after all.

41

The Stream of Consciousness is the river of hell.

—Elémire Zolla,
Archetypes

W
hen I’d flopped down on my bed, still woozy and confused about how to behave to Ian, he tapped on my door and came in, beginning with the time-honored way of heading off recriminations: “Lulu, before you say anything—”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.” I wasn’t; I could barely raise my head.

He sat on his usual chair across the room, not tugging at his collar. He launched into a speech: “I know I haven’t been candid with you, but I didn’t intend not being candid, I intended, I sincerely tried to… you don’t want to hear this right now, do you?… Lu, are you all right? You look sick.”

“Yes, no, I have the flu,” I said. “I just need to sleep. I’m sorry, I think I have a fever.”

He put his hand on my forehead. “You feel hot.”

“I think so.”

“I’ll just talk—you don’t need to say anything. No, I’m sorry. Do you need the doctor?”

“I think it’s just flu,” I said.

I couldn’t raise my head, but I could think. As I lay there, I couldn’t stop thinking, in fact, thoughts whirling around and pulsing in my ears, not very coherently. Of Ian, of Gazi, but mostly of Amid. How sorry I was that I didn’t believe in being forgiven. I didn’t know how that worked. Amid would just sit with me forever, not, eventually, a wracking guilt, probably, but an uneasiness forever. Maybe I would do even worse things, next to which Amid’s fate would sit lightly. That was certainly one way out.

I was aware that Ian stood there a long time. He touched my face, tenderly, almost amorously, it seemed. I heard him tiptoe out.

Would I have let him stay? No! Fresh from Gazi’s bed—he wouldn’t have dared. Anyway, I was probably communicable, and I wouldn’t have allowed him to stay, if I had had the strength to prevent it.

42

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

—Sir Walter Scott,
Marmion
C.VI, stanza 17

B
y Sunday morning, I couldn’t ignore that I was truly better and had to get up and set about doing things, beginning with a visit to Posy. Posy was still in a posh little clinic, a complex of low buildings in Guéliz where, I gather, most Europeans and well‐off Moroccans gave birth. She lay against her pillows, looking exactly the same size as before around the middle, but flushed and feverish. I kept my distance because of my recent illness and could only peek in from the doorway. The baby was not in the room, but a nurse brought her past me as I stood there. She was the smallest of creatures and, despite the great bulk Posy had attained at the end, weighed only six pounds, with a furze of marigold-colored hair on her pink scalp. Her wide, bright eyes, already seeming to track and focus, were a tentative blue. Maybe it was too early for them to reveal their ultimate color. She was called Marigold.

“Robin insisted on that,” she said. “It’s a nice name, but a bit silly with Posy. Posy and Marigold.”

“He’s envisioning a Rose, a Daisy—a whole bouquet to come,” I said.

“I thought you’d never come; you were sick, I heard,” she said.

I hoped she would think that my illness explained my not coming with her the night she went into labor. “Yes, I’m sorry, I don’t know what it was. I was afraid to come when I felt it coming on. I have a sort of fear of hospitals besides.”

“Sod this place, I want to come home,” she said. Marigold was already three days old, she was eating, and Posy felt fine, but Morocco viewed European women as fragile and obliged them to stay in child‐bed for days, resting and eating.

The room had the milky baby smell. Maybe I wasn’t immune to babies, for I fell under the charm of this smell. But Posy was stiff and frightened when she took her baby up and seemed unsure of how to hold her to the breast. The hospital women found this funny, and good‐naturedly mimed comfortable nursing positions and piled pillows on Posy’s lap to prop the baby on. The clinic seemed chilly to me, and they had wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and around Marigold.

She told me Ian had come to visit her already this morning. “He was going on as if he hadn’t been away,” Posy said, “but I came right out and asked him about Gazi. She’s in Spain, that’s all he’d say.” She was trying to suckle, but the baby kept breaking loose and whimpering. “I don’t know what it is; I have plenty of milk, that’s what they say—the woman, the nurse,” she complained desperately.

“Do you think the Cotters would take Suma back, if she left the Al‐Sayads, even just for a few weeks?” This question seemed to divert her from her anguished struggle with little Marigold.

“Probably. What, does she want to leave?”

“I haven’t actually talked to her about that,” I admitted. “But it must be awkward for her there, and her terrible brother will assume the worst has happened, her having been alone with Khaled like that. I think she should get out right away.”

“The downside is the brother could find her more easily at the Cotters’.” Thus we discussed the pros and cons of Suma’s situation and her options, without hitting on anything just right for her. I said she’d be perfectly safe in France. If the family accepted the virginity test, they’d call off her punishment.

“Sod it all, I want to come home.”

When the nurse had taken Marigold, I ventured close enough to kiss Posy before taking my leave, and could see the deep panic in her eyes.

T
he same afternoon, I had a rendezvous with Taft, who had responded to my anxious e‐mail with the suggestion we meet at the Mamounia. Rashid took me there after lunch. Ian had not been seen for lunch or breakfast.

Taft startled me. We were in the Mamounia bar, and he was wearing a djellaba and the white cap the local men wore. I almost didn’t recognize him sitting at a table near the door, he looked so natural. Most non-Moroccans look too pale for this comfortable costume. Now, for the first time, I noticed Taft’s eyes and hair were as dark as those of most of the men there. I wondered if he was going to carry this disguise to the point of refraining from alcohol, but he ordered a vodka tonic, and a glass of white wine for me.

I plunged into my worries about Desi, maybe not emphasizing the real extent of my fears and feeling of responsibility, trying to be cooler than that.

“We should be able to find out what they found on her,” he told me, seeming surprised that I should be worried about this. “They haven’t gotten back to us, but they’ve had a lot to occupy them, with bombs going off all over town.” This led to the subject that interested him more.

“At least we have the satisfaction of being right, telling them things were heating up here,” he added of the bombings. “All directed at driving away tourism, driving away foreigners. Aimed at the French, I would think, as much as Americans.”

“Nothing has happened in France lately,” I said.

“Nothing since Toulouse. But it looks like something is coming down already on the subject of our late friend. It could be serious shit, Lulu, in Washington and in Paris.”

I wasn’t surprised. Here was the official reproach, the finger of blame, coming closer. “Already?”

“The disappearance of a French national in American custody. They heard about it right away, and the French are vindictive, like the Italians were. Encouraged by the Italians, probably—they’ll pursue it in the courts, they can make a serious international fuss. They don’t like us to begin with, and they really don’t like our cooperation with the Moroccans, what ever they say.”

“Please, Taft, what are you talking about?” My stomach did a slow crawl. I didn’t see how France could know what happened to Amid, or anything that would connect me to it. I had thought about this pretty thoroughly; it was obviously someone from Ain Aouda—someone there, in our own facility, had reported the event to the French. It could be anybody who saw us at Ain Aouda, even Snyder.

How did they find out? I asked. My dismay at this was less about my personal safety than at being let down by someone I had come to trust, had liked—say if the rat were Snyder. But I had no reason to think it was. Quite soon I would become concerned for my personal safety too, when it sank in that I could go to prison, even that they might have capital punishment in Morocco.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“It’s not impossible Amid was working for the French, NOC, infiltrating radical groups. We hadn’t heard that, though.”

“And planning to kill his sister as a cover? That seems extreme.”

“Separate issues. A side issue or part of his cover to help him infiltrate the local scene. This is speculation on my part. I haven’t heard this.”

Could Suma be complicit? I thought about her right away. Could she and Amid both be some kind of French agents? Details of Suma’s behavior, including her move to the Al‐Sayads’, made sense both if she was spying on them, or helping Amid, and also if you assumed the opposite, that she was being protected from Amid by the Al‐Sayads, which would also imply that they knew something. Or maybe she was spying on them because they were the money launderers? But would they want to have anything to do with library bombs and Desi’s attempt at the concert? I couldn’t believe that.

“They know you were there, in Ain Aouda. You’re noticeable, Lulu, especially in the context of a black site. Not a lot of girls around. My fault, I should have thought of that. Told you to wear a hat and shades.”

“Shades, I did.”

“Cover the hair.”

“I did. Anyway, there are lots of blonde European women with driver’s licenses,” I said. “How could they identify me?”

He sniffed. “Be on the lookout,” he said. “It seems clear someone outed you—us—to the French. I’m thinking about it. We’ll take care of it, somehow. We aren’t going to hang you out.” When Taft said this was when I knew he might. Though our agency had a reputation for sticking by its own, it often didn’t, when the convenient fall person was an alien of some kind, like the Iraqis after the first Gulf War or now, or the South Koreans, and I was an alien of some kind.

Working bare. The significance came back to me now. Under some circumstances, we can’t know you. They’d warned me about that. It was hard for me to feel a sense of personal jeopardy—protected American law-abider I thought of myself as—but reason reminded me that working bare meant that if France pursued me, I’d be given up to them.

“Why are you wearing those clothes?” I asked Taft, to conceal the panic that began to rise.

“Comfortable. I like ’em. Less restrictive in the genital area, better for male all-round health. I’m taking some of these robe things back to Spain. I have some news: Peggy is getting a divorce, and she’s coming back to Spain with me.”

For a moment I drew a complete blank. Peggy?

“Dick Whitworth is a son of a bitch; it’s about time. She and Tarik and I’ll probably leave tomorrow. Walt Snyder has already gone. Best to get him out of here, he doesn’t have the handy… skill set you have to save his skin with. Have you decided what you’re going to do about the girl? The Arab girl?”

I knew he meant Suma, not Desi. I’d about decided what to tell Suma: that Amid had gone back to France. She’d presume I’d given him news of the virginity certificate. Then she’d assume her parents were reassured and would call to find out more, and they’d tell her they hadn’t seen him. Meantime, we were on record as believing he’d left Morocco. I couldn’t see a hole in this, and it had the advantage of giving Suma less need to feel afraid that he was lurking around every corner.

I also wanted to know from her about the state of mind, or the actual whereabouts, of Khaled Al‐Sayad. I had a moment’s fantasy that Gazi had gone back to him. We went over a few such matters, and then I left for my next appointment, hardly feeling up to it, now obliged to include in my worries the menacing scenario laid out by Taft, in which I’d take the blame for Amid’s death, what ever horrors that involved of punishment or prison.

Snyder called me soon after this, from Cádiz.

“
Ciao,
Lulu.”

“
Ciao,
Walt.”

“You’ve heard?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve decided not to worry. Fuck it, we’ve got plenty of recourse.”

“I’m happy to hear that. I wish I knew what.”

“Something will turn up. This is a message of solidarity.”

“Thanks, Walt.”

“OK,
ciao,
Lulu, we’ll be in touch.”

“Walt, do you ever have second thoughts?”

A pause. “Yes. But it’s a job.”

“I guess.
Ciao,
Walt.”