Tangier (24 page)

Robin looked hard at Kranker, so gleefully attacking his friend.
Never trust a writer
, he thought.
Sooner or later he'll sell you out
.

When the kebabs were ready Robin called everyone to lunch. Doyle came back from his walk, and all the Moroccan boys returned from the sand. They sat in their bikinis in an inner circle chatting in Arabic about sports, while their benefactors lounged behind them on beach chairs speaking of the Tangier demimonde. Robin served the skewers and passed the salads. Fortunately Inigo and Wax had brought lavish ones, since Barclay had brought nothing except Mustapha, his towels, and himself.

"How's everything at the church these days, Peter? Your investigations getting anyplace?"

"We have our suspects." Barclay laughed. "We're narrowing down the field."

"None of us, I hope."

"Oh—maybe. You'll have to ask the Colonel about that."

"But surely you don't expect him to solve the thing?"

"Why not?" said Robin. "He's got nothing else to do."

"But
really
," said Wax. "Horticulturalist, genealogist, and now amateur sleuth. Old Lester is good at things like checking up on a story. If someone claims his uncle was an earl, old Lester will find him out. But he's no detective. He's too lazy and stupid for that."

"Don't underrate him," said Bainbridge. "He's got a passion to get to the bottom of this thing and I wager his stick-to-itiveness will out."

"You certainly have plenty of that yourself, Mother Bainbridge. By God, you've stuck to that grapefruit juicer of yours."

Everyone laughed a little, and Bainbridge wilted. Robin felt sorry for him. For years his inventions had been a joke, but recently people had begun to make fun of him to his face. Barclay, who pretended to be his friend, never came to his defense and scornfully called him "my lady-in-waiting" when talking about him behind his back.

Wax must have felt sorry for him too, for he immediately launched into an irrelevant story. Robin had heard it before, but Wax's gestures were so theatrical, and his voice so compelling, that he found himself falling under the old man's spell.

"Oh, about 1938 I met Bosie Douglas in Florence. He was old then, a ruin, but still a magnificent-looking man. I told him how awed I was to actually meet such a legend—how I'd read all about him as a boy. We became rather close, and of course I asked him about Oscar Wilde. He told me the most incredible thing—that he and Wilde had never screwed. I couldn't believe it, but he insisted. Wilde, he said, was after him for years, but Bosie always resisted him, and the most that ever happened was that occasionally he'd let old Oscar suck him off. This suggests a theory about the idea behind
Dorian Gray
—imbibing the life juices of a younger man in order to stay young oneself. Anyway, I said to him: 'If you weren't that way, Lord Douglas, why did you go around with Wilde all the time?' 'Simple,' he answered. 'Wilde was the most brilliant companion a man could have. And it annoyed my father, whom I loathed.' Fascinating! The funny thing about Bosie was that he was interested in girls—young ones too, twelve and thirteen years old. He'd follow them around Florence like a rake. I told him he'd better be careful about that, but he laughed me off. 'There's not a court in the world,' he said, 'that will ever believe that Bosie Douglas is a dyke!' "

In a way, Robin thought, it was a precious story, and he was annoyed when Barclay tried to eclipse it with one of his own. He told a boring anecdote about an English actor he'd once slept with who'd used his appendix scar as the centerpiece for a butterfly tattooed above his loins.

When he was finished Wax baited him by suggesting that Kalem and Mustapha fight.

"Won't allow it," Barclay said. "I know you sent your boy to karate school. I've been coaching Mustapha in something else."

"Oh? What's that?"

"To speak like an Eton boy. A hopeless cause, of course."

Inigo excused himself, gesturing for Pumpkin Pie to follow him into the sea. Doyle went off in another direction, Bainbridge and the poodle clipper went to sun themselves on the docks, and Lundgren and the Moroccan boys began to play soccer on the beach. This left Robin with Barclay, Kranker, and Wax, and a discussion of the "Mohammed problem" upon which they were all quite eloquent, he thought.

"Oh, they make us suffer," Barclay said. "They love to do that. Look at Inigo. The terrible things he has to take from that Pumpkin Pie. We teach them, introduce them around, show them how to use a knife and fork. And what do they do? Steal, chase after girls, and feel no gratitude for all the love we lavish so generously upon their wretched souls. They're in it for the money and the comfort. Certainly not the love. And we can do nothing to change them. We can only acquiesce."

"That," said Kranker, "is why I stick to the Socco. They're good for sex and nothing else. I wouldn't live with one if he paid me. I don't have time to suffer on their account."

"But it's marvelous to suffer," Wax put in. "Don't you think, Robin? Oh—but you're too poor! To really suffer you have to be rich like me, and offer them ways to become corrupt. Look at them over there." He pointed to the soccer game. "Look at them, preening around like little cock dandies. They're animals, that's all, and they don't care a hang about us. Except for what they can get—food, clothes, a warm bed. Thing to do is trick 'em. Make 'em think they'll be remembered in our wills. Kalem, like the rest of them, is in for a big surprise. I promise him things, tasty little
objets d'art
. 'This necklace will be yours someday, dear.' 'Someday you'll have my crucifixes, my furs, my robes.' Ha! He won't get a cent. I'm leaving everything to my sister in Sussex."

"Oh, come, Patrick," Robin said. "What you say is cruel—to corrupt them with all your stuff and then throw them back on the dungheap when you're done."

"Not cruel at all, my boy. The dungheap's precisely where they belong. It's good for them to be there. Builds their characters, you see. Anyway, they can study me, and when I'm done with them they can sink or swim on their bloody own. If they don't learn how to hustle from me, they certainly don't deserve to survive. Tangier's a cruel town, and I'm no exception. Let's face it—it's the boys who brought us here. And we pay a hell of a lot for that."

"One pays for everything," Barclay said.

"That's right. So why be sentimental? But you are, Peter. You have a nauseating sentimental streak. What's this I hear about Camilla Weltonwhist giving a birthday party for Mustapha?"

"She is, next week. Nice of her too."

"She's secretly in love with you, Barclay. It's her poor sad way of ingratiating herself."

Barclay shrugged. "Fine. Let her ingratiate. She's been a good deal more successful at it than you."

"Look at Sven there," said Wax, pretending he hadn't heard. "He's a terrible dentist. Probably the worst dentist in the world. Yet the poor idiot keeps at it, because he doesn't know how to hustle any other way. He's slept with St. Carlton on and off for years, and all he ever got out of it was a closet full of St. Carlton-designed ties."

"I don't get your point," Robin said.

"Well, I'm sorry about that, dear boy. Let me try to make it clear. My point is that the world's divided between those who hustle, those who squeeze the ripe fruit of life and suck out of it all the juices therein, and the rest of humanity, the poor working bastards who are hustled and squeezed to death. Now which is better—to be a squeezer or one of the squeezed? Do you see? That's the one thing I've learned in life, the one thing I have to pass on. You've been living in Tangier for ten years, you're getting a belly, and you're losing your looks. You live in a pigsty, sell dope, make shabby little deals, and write your delicious column. Well, what have you got to show for it? You should have done like me, latched onto a rich old man when you were eighteen or twenty, learned all his tricks, ingratiated yourself, gotten yourself into his will. Course you're redheaded, and redheads don't usually succeed.

"I was lucky. I found a prince. Not a temporal prince, mind you—a prince of the church. He was rich too, had vast inherited lands. We spent ten years together, and I got everything in the end. Most of it I lost in the war, but I'd learned to hustle and was able to make another pile on my own. How? Selling things, trading, hustling furniture and art. The point is that I had a métier. So here I am, in decadent Tangier, rich as Croesus, with a beautiful chicken who obeys me like a dog. I don't envy anyone. I wouldn't change places with blue-blooded Barclay here for anything in the world. I was born the son of a chimney sweep, but I squeezed the fruit of life and sucked out everything that was there. The trouble with you, Robin, is that you skip around too much. You've got good instincts, but you don't go for the kill."

"Thank you, Patrick," Robin solemnly replied. "I appreciate your analysis. Everything you say is true. Now I shall go into the tent and weep."

"Don't weep, boy," Wax called after him. "You're adorable. We love you, you know."

Robin turned, smiled, waved his hand, then retired to the tent to rest.

Inigo was the first to leave. There were still many hours left of light, and he wanted to go home and paint. Then Doyle left too, dragging his sack, to drive back with Kranker and Nordeen. Lundgren and his Mohammed hitched a ride with Wax and Kalem. Barclay took a dip, put his arm around Mustapha, and came to sit by Robin while he dried off.

"Now, Robin," he said, "we've had our differences. But I like you, so I must give you some good advice. Stay clear of Patrick Wax. He's a nasty piece of work."

"I think he's quite amusing, Peter—"

"Awful person. Phony. A thief. Everything out of his mouth is a lie. That absurd story about Bosie Douglas—and how he loves to say 'Lord Alfred Douglas'! I happen to know Bosie wasn't anywhere near Florence in thirty-eight. He was in London, sick with pneumonia. We were cousins, you see."

"Yes, yes, but what difference does it make? Everyone lies in Tangier."

"There are degrees, Robin. Degrees. People like Wax go in for homosexuality because of the social mobility involved. Wax would be a chimney sweep like his father if he hadn't gotten smart and become a pouf."

"What are you saying? That he's not a pouf? That it's nothing but an act?"

"You said it—not me. But it's true. He's false, from A to Zed. He became gay just to get in with his betters, and because it allowed him to enter circles where it was easier to steal. Beware of him, Robin. He really shouldn't have been here. This was to be a chickenhawk and bumboy party. He didn't belong!"

He left then, abruptly, and Robin looked after him amazed: Barclay condemning Patrick Wax for pretending to be a homosexual because he couldn't condemn him for pretending to be a lord. Wax made no bones about his background. He loved to tell people he was a chimney sweep's son and played the role of imposter to the hilt. Now Barclay accused him of being a heterosexual in disguise. It was the most absurd thing Robin had ever heard.

Bainbridge and the poodle clipper were the last to go, and Robin was not displeased. Percy said he was working on a new invention, something extraordinary, a "three-cornered kiss."

"It will revolutionize group sex, bring coherence to carnality," he said in his Australian whine. "It's not an invention so much as a technique. I won't be able to patent it, but I do hope people give me credit. I want them always to refer to it as 'the Bainbridge kiss.' "

When they were gone Robin put on his shirt, then lay out in the dying sun. Hervé
 
was down by the sea washing the glasses and plates. Robin watched him, a silhouette against the Atlantic. The sea was smooth, a great expanse broken only by an oil tanker moving slowly out of the distance toward the Straits.

"Shall we take down the tent and drive back?" Hervé
 
asked. He'd packed the skewers and glasses in a basket.

"I don't know," said Robin. "Why don't we sleep out here tonight?"

Hervé
 
agreed, and so the two of them sat together on the sand waiting hours for the sun to set. Robin had taken in too much of it. He felt a fever rising to his forehead as if all the heat he'd absorbed in the afternoon was breaking out now in the cool of the dusk.

Later, feeling better, lying before the tent with Hervé Beaumont by his side, Robin remembered that this was the night of the summer solstice, the shortest night of the longest day of the year. In three months the autumnal equinox would come, then the winter solstice and circles more of changing seasons after that. As he pondered these cosmic matters, the antics of the afternoon began to take on a new perspective in his thoughts.

He felt let down by his picnic, bitter and angry too. He didn't know why, since everyone had been nasty as he'd hoped, and he'd heard some good stories, even picked up some tidbits for his column. Perhaps it was the predictability of the nastiness that bothered him, the way they'd all tattled on one another, the foul perfume of their gossip and lies. It seemed more pathetic than amusing that Vincent Doyle lugged around his silverware. There was pathos in Barclay trying to make an Eton boy out of Mustapha, and in Inigo, a great artist, suffering over Pumpkin Pie. Bainbridge and his absurd inventions. Lundgren, the incompetent dentist. Kranker, so filled with bitterness and spite. He even felt sorry for Wax and his pretensions, his "Florence of Arabia" act. They all seemed so absurd, cruel, self-deceiving fools mingling on the sand, specks on a speck in an indifferent universe, so flawed, so powerless in the face of the burning sun.