Tangier (2 page)

"But that's so
complicated
. Why not soap and water?"

"Of course," said Zvegintzov, "I can sell you soap if you wish. But even the dullest servants, I assure you—"

"Some good mild soap will do very nicely. And I'll take this
Connaissance des Arts
."

Zvegintzov shrugged, rang the charges up. General Bresson was next—he had come with a bitter complaint.

"Three days ago I told you my telephone didn't work, but still you haven't set it right."

Zvegintzov screwed up his canny Russian face and stared across at the old warrior's chest.
 
He was used to humiliations, even seemed to welcome them, as if by his patience he could shame his tormentors into acknowledging his infinite good will.

"Excuse me, General.
 
My man's been sick.
 
I'll have it fixed tomorrow night."

"I don't like to think about
little
things – that's why I subscribe to your service.
 
But I insist on promptness and that you keep your word.
 
Otherwise there isn't any point."

The General stalked out of the shop, grasping a
Le Figaro
on his way.
 
For a moment there was silence, then Hamid shook his head.

"What a difficult man.
 
And so abrasive."

"The General needs his phone.
 
I understand."

"But he's very rude."

"No, no, Inspector.
 
My clients are wonderful people.
 
A little hard at times, but underneath they have good hearts.
 
They're human, after all.
 
We all have our moods. Really I think they appreciate what I do.
 
I make their lives here easy, give them peace of mind.
 
I'm a cushion for their difficulties, and always they're grateful in the end.
 
They know that if I weren't here, their lives would be too complex.
 
I have no doubt that some of them would leave."

As he spoke Zvegintov danced behind the counter, straightening his display of cigars, arranging and rearranging his jars of English jams and marmelades.
 
Hamid watched him, pitying his tension, but Zvegintov's platitudes made him want to wince.

"Tell me," he said.
 
"How do you manage to fix their phones?"

Zvegintzov smiled.
 
"I know a man who works at the PTT.
 
I slip him a little something and he works for me at night."

"Yes," Hamid nodded.
 
"Clever—I admire that."

"It's the only way to get them repaired.
 
Morale is bad at the company.
 
It takes them weeks to process a complaint.
 
There are, at this moment, over six hundred lines out of order in Tangier.
 
Did you know that?
 
Extraordinary!
 
So you see, if we were to go through channels, the proper way, half the lines on the Mountain would be out right now. And that would be a tragedy for my clients, of course, but not only for them. If you think about it a moment you'll see what I mean. I'm speaking, of course, from your point of view." He winked. "If there were no phones, after all, then there wouldn't be anything to tap—"

He stopped then and let out a little gasp. He realized he'd been babbling and had dangerously overstepped.

"Kalinka,"
he said suddenly, in a whisper. "How is
she?

Hamid stared at him.

"Yes, yes, I know," said Zvegintzov. "Your life together is good. I know that. I've heard. I hear everything, you see. They tell me she was sick last month. I wanted—but still I care for her. It's foolish. I know it's foolish."

Hamid wanted to say something, to put this conversation to an end. But Zvegintzov continued, at a new, more frantic pitch. "I wish she'd come by the shop sometime, early in the morning, before my customers come in. I so long for that—to see her face, feel her hand, her cheek—"

The telephone rang. Zvegintzov turned abruptly and fled to the rear of his shop. Hamid looked after him for a moment, then backed out into the street. It was dark then, still windy. The air was cool, but his face was flushed. He'd seen tears behind the thick lenses that shielded Peter Zvegintzov's eyes, and this glimpse of pain, so sudden and acute, filled him with alarm.

As he slid into his car, he noticed a Volkswagen with diplomatic license plates parked farther up the street. The American Vice-Consul, Foster Knowles, sat behind the wheel. As Hamid passed, he had the impression that Knowles was watching the shop.

He began to drive about the Mountain aimlessly, wandering up and down the little lanes. The Manchesters' Buick was parked in the gateway of their pink stucco monstrosity, and at General Bresson's sumptuous villa he could see light behind the grills. He wandered past the homes of numerous foreigners, Camilla Weltonwhist's gray fortress, the Cotswold cottage of the Australian inventor Percy Bainbridge, and the home of Peter Barclay hidden behind a privet hedge.

The thought, the very thought of Zvegintzov's wrinkled hand on Kalinka's cheek.

He drove then to the region of walled estates, the homes of Tangier's rich. He passed the great old manor of Rachid El Fassi, built a century before by his ancestors from Fez; the beige extravaganza of the Paraguayan painter Inigo; the black-floored palace of Patrick Wax. He passed Jimmy Sohario's "Excalibur," built on a fortune's worth of Chinese laundries; and at the end, at the Mountain's highest point, he paused before the great gates of "Castlemaine," where the American millionaire Henderson Perry was in residence a few weeks a year.

From here it seemed to Hamid that he had a commanding view of his terrain. He knew them all, these rich Americans and Europeans, knew their houses, their cars, their habits, and roughly how much each of them was worth. He knew who they saw and what they did, their cliques, their vices, their complicated whims. And there were many others he knew as well—hundreds more, diplomats and commercial people who lived in apartments in the town, hippies and dope peddlers who lived in the medina, the eccentrics of the Casbah, the doctors, barons, retired naval officers, and desperate divorcees who lived on the Marshan or on the Charf. From here he could see everything, from the Mountain to the foothills of the Rif, the whole raging town and, between Peter Zvegintzov's shop on the Jew's River and the Italian cathedral on the edge of modern Tangier, the place where he was born, the great sprawling slum, Dradeb.

Zvegintzov, Zvegintzov! Who could understand a man like that?

Since he'd been a boy, Hamid had been enamored of the European colony of Tangier—its impoverished duchesses, vicious homosexuals, doctors without medical degrees, artists, hustlers, fools. He was fascinated by these expatriates, their endless
danse macabre.
He observed with wonder all their attempts to acquire stunning lovers, their intrigues, their bizarre affairs. For years they'd been his obsession, and now, facing the wind before the huge gates of Henderson Perry's estate, he saw them laid before him like a banquet, ready for him to taste, digest. He looked to his left across the water, toward the beckoning lights of the coastal towns of Spain. Europe was close—it seemed as if he could touch it if he wished. But the Straits of Gibraltar loomed in the night like an uncrossable abyss between.
And that,
he thought unhappily,
is the way it is for me.

He knew these strange people, and yet he did not. Though he had spent years learning their languages, studying the women and boys they fought over and loved, hearing their confessions, observing the results of all manner of their crimes, still there was a wall that separated him from them, a wall he longed to breach.

It made him furious when he thought of it, but an instant later he was resigned. There was no point in considering the possibility that sometime when he was small and had gaped at everything foreign and longed to comprehend it, he'd taken upon himself a terrible burden, wandered by error into an inescapable maze. He had lavished too much of himself already to even consider the possibility of that. Rather, he knew, he must continue to strive until, in some night of insight, their mystery would be revealed. But if at times he was amazed by emotions he could not understand—Peter Zvegintzov's tears over Kalinka, as fresh as if five months had never passed—still he was driven to look deeper, uncover more, examine all the combinations until he discovered the secret of their unfathomable European game.

He drove back down the Mountain, then slowed as he passed La Colombe. Foster Knowles was still waiting in his car.
Why? What was he doing?
Now, too, he would have to think about that.

As he drove through Dradeb, a hundred yards or so before the mosque, his headlights caught the figure of a man standing in the middle of the road. He was waving his arms, motioning traffic to the side. A crowd of men and youths surrounded a large tourist bus ahead. Hamid rolled down his window, caught the sound of angry cries. But the wind was too loud and he could not make out the words. He pulled over, parked, then walked into the mob. Looking up, he could see the tourists, their frightened faces peering out. Angry men were pushing at the driver, who was babbling furiously to two uniformed police.

He strode quickly up Rue de Chypre, the lane that led to Achar's clinic. The moment he entered he could smell the disinfectant. It came upon him like a blow across his face. It was eight o'clock and still there were people waiting to be helped. They sat in rows of hard benches, some in casts, others holding their stomachs, a tall, thin girl with a soiled bandage wrapped about her head. He avoided a wet patch on the floor, something thick and yellow sprinkled with a layer of sawdust that had not yet soaked it up. From the cubicles where the doctors worked he could hear moans and a few kind words.

He ran into Achar at the operating room door. The doctor's white gown was spotted with dark red stains. His large hands, firm and covered with black curls of hair, grasped at Hamid's arm.

"What happened?"

"A little girl. Impossible to save her." Achar shook his head. "Come," he said, leading Hamid into his little office in the back. They sat down amidst the clutter. Achar smoothed his mustache, then yelled for someone to bring them tea.

"Did you see the accident?"

"No. I was driving through. It must have happened a few seconds before."

"Pointless, of course. The bus was going much too fast. They have no business taking tourists through these streets."

"It's the best way back from Cap Spartel—"

"Yes. Of course. Do you know what they say—the guides on the buses? They have to keep talking, you see. If there's nothing 'touristic' to point out then they have to make something up. When they come through here they say 'This is a typical Moroccan village, settled by people from the Rif who have left their farms to seek their fortunes in Tangier.' How absurd! I have no doubt the cameras click away."

Hamid nodded. He was used to Achar's rage. "What happened tonight?"

The doctor shrugged. "A typical incident. There's no water in Dradeb during the day, so when the public taps are turned on at night the children are all waiting with their jugs. Probably this little girl was late, and ran across the street to get a place in line."

Hamid began to think of his boyhood in Dradeb, fetching water for his mother, carrying bread to the ovens on a board on top of his head.

"Suicide Village."

"What's that?"

"That's what they call Dradeb."

"Who calls it that?"

"The foreigners, Mohammed. My friends on the Mountain."

The tea arrived and they both began to sip.

"My beautiful friends. They zoom through here in their cars, and always there are donkeys and sheep and little children running about. There are old women who are deaf, and old men who ignore their horns. So it seems to them that this is a place filled with animals and people who want to throw themselves beneath their wheels. Suicide Village—do you see?"

"Oh, I see," said Achar. "An amusing little name for a place which unfortunately they can't avoid. Well—I'm a surgeon. One of these days all your friends will have to leave. Or else we'll have to cut them out."

Hamid looked at him, neither nodding nor shaking his head. There were men at the S
û
ret
é
who would use such a statement as a pretext to start a black dossier.

"Aside from all that," Hamid said finally, "have you had a good day?"

"Terrible! This afternoon a woman was brought in. Literally she was bleeding to death. She'd tried to abort herself with an uncurled coat hanger. She punctured herself, of course, infected her entire womb. I gave her massive doses of sulfa drugs and tetanus, everything I had. Tomorrow I'll operate—if she's still alive, and if I can get sufficient blood."

His anger over all this misery showed brightly in his eyes.

"I envy you," said Hamid.

Achar began to laugh.

"No. I envy you. You're a scientist. You can be certain about the truth. The diagnosis may be right or wrong, but moral questions don't arise."