Tangier (34 page)

Sympathy:
For years he'd lavished it on foreigners. Now he resented them for taking up his time. His capacity, which had once seemed infinite, to hear confessions and then absolve, was diminishing little by little as each July day passed. The summer was at its height, his office was flooded with cases, but his attention was focused on Kalinka, his search to understand her, uncover her dreamy past.

Every night now they talked, though both of them were tired, she from her work at Achar's clinic, he from his hours at the Sûreté. She was assisting Driss Bennani with a "census" of the slumdwellers—she called it a "census" though Hamid felt it was more than that. But when he hinted to her that he disapproved, she waved his objections away. "Are you jealous?" she asked playfully. "Do you want me to stay home like a Moroccan squaw?" He shook his head and did not persist. Her tongue had become sharper since she'd started to work, and she didn't forget things anymore.

Most of her memories were based on conversations she'd overheard, or things her mother had told her, but still there was a sharpness to these scenes as if she'd observed them all herself. There were inconsistencies, of course, pieces that didn't fit, but when Hamid listened to her and closed his eyes her memories came alive.

He had a vision of Peter Zvegintzov: he is in hiding when the Viet Minh come to power, crouching by day in the boarded-up back room of his parents' shop, going out at night, foraging for bread. But then, a week or so later, after order is restored, Peter embarks upon an obsessive search for Marguerite and Stephen Zhukovsky's child. He walks the back streets of Hanoi, the rutted dirt streets where the Vietnamese live, passes abandoned trucks and tanks, and Catholic families packing up to leave. He asks questions, walks and walks, but can find no trace of them at all.

At last, one evening, beginning to think that they are dead, he returns to his shop, where he finds a waiting boy. The boy leads him to a roofless shanty in the refugee district on the southern edge of town where he finds Marguerite and Kalinka shivering in the rain.

A year later—the end of 1946—the French are back in control. The Viet Minh have been double-crossed by De Gaulle and Chiang Kai-shek. The French have slaughtered twenty thousand Vietnamese in Haiphong. Ho Chi Minh, retreating to the jungles, has begun the Indochina war.

Peter sits in the back room staring at the wall. Kalinka, an infant, plays with groceries on the floor. Marguerite sweeps out the shop with a bamboo broom. It scratches against the wood—Kalinka recalls the noise.

Peter is shattered. A man destroyed, he screams in the night, then moans and weeps. His torture by the Japanese has left him with fear and scars. But Marguerite nurses him and somehow finds them food. "Survive, Peter!" she tells him. "A man can recover from wounds. Take sustenance in ideals, fraternity, revolution, the struggle to forge a society that is just."

Early in 1947 Peter reopens his parents' shop, a glorified grocery store, a prototype for La Colombe. He is busy for weeks replenishing his stock, building new and higher shelves. He has strung the curtain that divides the back room, separating Marguerite and Kalinka's bed from his. He decorates the outside of the store with flashing Christmas lights, then announces the reopening in the French-language press. Customers come in. He offers them special service. They ask about Marguerite. "My concubine," says Peter, "and Kalinka, my child."

Thus begins the network of lies that is to become a screen around their lives. The shop is a front, a center for espionage carried out from the back room by Marguerite. Hamid has a clear vision of her—a fascinating woman he wishes he could have known. She is strong, made of iron, burning with revolutionary zeal, but also kind and capable of great tenderness, a woman who always smiles.

Peter runs the shop; Marguerite runs the agents. They come and go, bringing instructions, carrying back her information to the jungles and the war. One day at dawn a man in black pajamas appears. He is a courier come to deliver her commission. She has attained the rank of major. She is among the most effective cadre in Hanoi.

Peter bounces Kalinka on his knee, up and down, up and down. Through the window she can see her mother bicycling up the street. Marguerite has gone on a mission. Peter doesn't know when she'll return. That night he reads Kalinka a fairy tale, then kisses her and turns off the light. She lies on the big bed, the bed she shares with her mother. She can hear Peter undressing on the other side of the curtain. He is humming to himself. She feels safe.

Years pass. Kalinka grows up. Business at the shop expands. The front of the store is crowded with officers' wives leaving their letters to be weighed and mailed and talking among themselves. Peter, a busybody, a gossip, shrewdly draws them out. He giggles at inanities. People take him for a fool. Always he is darting back and forth, disappearing into the back room. He is relaying information to Marguerite on troop movements, transfers, local politics, morale.

When the shop is closed for lunch Marguerite sets a teapot on the fire. Peter steams the letters open. He has discovered the secrets of flaps and seals.

All goes well until 1952, when suddenly there is consternation in the shop. Kalinka, nine years old, comes home one day from school. She greets Peter and her mother, sets her satchel down, but neither one of them looks up. For days after that she can feel their tension—French counterintelligence has discovered Peter's Soviet connections before the war. They suspect him of being a Russian field officer coordinating deliveries of arms to the Viet Minh. He is being watched. Strangers come in. They make small purchases and drill Peter with their eyes. There is a car parked across the street. Two men sit in it reading newspapers. The deliverymen who carry Marguerite's reports are warned to stay away.

Conferences. Meetings. Hushed conversations. Kalinka hears them plotting through the night. It is Marguerite, after all, who poses the real danger to the French, but it is Peter, finally, who is arrested—the French have taken her for an ignorant Tonkinoise.

Peter's interrogation—no beatings this time, nothing like his treatment by the Japanese. Bright lights in his eyes, hours without sleep. Finally he confesses to great and monstrous crimes, all rehearsed so many nights with Marguerite. The French, bewildered by the scope of his confession, take him for a major spy. He is too important to be imprisoned. They decide to expel him to Russia, a homeland he's never seen.

Much emotion that final hour when Marguerite and Kalinka visit him in jail. No possibility of Marguerite leaving too—she must stay behind to continue with the fight. But Kalinka is another matter. They discuss her future while she holds her mother's hand. If anything were to happen to Marguerite, Kalinka would be orphaned and alone. Finally it is decided—she will leave with Peter. Someday, sometime, when the war is over, they will all be reunited in Hanoi. A last exchange of hugs. Kalinka and Peter board the boat. Her last memory of her mother is the sight of her standing beside her bicycle waving to them from the pier.

Thus Kalinka's story was completed up to the time of her arrival in Tangier, a jigsaw puzzle of a life in which Hamid had searched for matching edges, gradually filled in holes and gaps. Still, for him, the biggest gap was not yet filled:
Why had Peter settled in Tangier, and why had he insisted that Kalinka pretend to be his wife?

He wondered why this was so important, why, having learned so much, he couldn't leave these matters alone.
Am I
, he asked himself,
behaving like a lover or a detective?
Both, he decided finally—
I can't help myself; I have to know
. Was it because Kalinka was getting away from him, growing, changing, beginning to contradict the personality he thought he had understood as, so laboriously, he'd unraveled her early life? He couldn't say. He knew only that solving the relationship between her and Peter had become an obsession, the problem to which his great troubling questions about all the foreigners had finally been reduced.

A
t 2:00 A.M. one morning the telephone rang, jarring Hamid from sleep. Eyes still closed, he grasped about for the receiver, then accidentally knocked it to the floor.

Kalinka turned on the lights. "I can hear someone talking," she said.

Hamid strained his ears and heard it too, an urgent garble of Arabic, distant and indistinct. "Yes?" he said, retrieving the receiver. "Yes? Yes?"

"Aziz, Inspector. I'm at the Sûreté."

"You want me to come down there too, I suppose." He sat up, adjusted his pillows. Kalinka covered up her ears and yawned.

"We need you, Hamid. We've got a fiasco down here. I wouldn't call at this hour if I weren't facing special difficulties—"

"All right, Aziz. I'll see you in a little while."

He hung up and began to dress. "There's a certain ironic tone," he explained to Kalinka, "that finds its way, occasionally, into Aziz's voice. Then I know I'm in for it. Absurd passions. A glimpse at the rot of the West." He slipped into his moccasins. "It's the best part of my job."

There was not a car on Hassan II as he drove quickly through the night, only a few souls still lingering at the cafés off Place de France. Aziz was waiting on the steps of the Sûreté, pacing back and forth, puffing nervously on a cigarette.

"This one's something, Hamid—prominent persons, overtones of sex. I have the principals separated now. A few minutes ago, when we put them all together, they started to fight like medina cats."

Poor Aziz
, he thought,
so loyal, so intelligent, but when it comes to the foreigners he still gets flustered and confused
.

"Don't worry." Hamid slapped him on the back. "We'll straighten this out soon enough. We'll go to my office. I want to hear everything in sequence. We must conduct our business in an orderly way."

He stopped off at a lavatory to splash cold water on his face. He wanted, always, to appear clear-headed and set a calm example for his staff.

When, finally, they were seated in the office, Aziz began to talk. Hamid was pleased by the cogency of his delivery and by gestures he recognized as his own.

"About an hour ago our operator received a call. The night clerk at the Hotel Continental reported a disturbance in one of his rooms. Since the Continental is in the Dar Baroud sector of the medina, the operator referred the complaint to the First Arrondisement. A pair of officers responded, arrests were made, and since foreigners were involved all the parties were brought down here. This is what we have: Mohammed Seraj, better known as Pumpkin Pie; an old whore who goes under the name of Sylvia; two young prostitutes, a boy and a girl, each about sixteen years old; Mr. and Mrs. Codd."

"Ashton and Musica Codd?"

Aziz gave a triumphant grin. "The Codds claim the role of complainants, but there's a difference of opinion on that. For one thing, they were arrested nude. And our investigating officers say Codd tried to thrash them with his walking stick. Pumpkin Pie claims they hired him to convince the teenagers to perform unnatural sexual acts. He says the whole fracas began when he refused and they turned on him in rage. The old whore claims she just happened to be in the next room and came out only when she heard the noise. The teenagers say she's their mother, and that she's in the business of renting them out."

"What do the Codds say to that?"

"They're claiming they were framed. They were 'interviewing' the kids, they say, when the whore arrived suddenly with Pumpkin Pie. These two tried to blackmail them, and when they refused to pay out they were brutally stripped and robbed. Codd says he assumed our men were other members of the gang. He merely tried to defend himself with the only implement he had at hand."

"Whew! All right, Aziz. Arrange six chairs in a crescent around my desk. Bring everybody in. I'm going down to the canteen. I need a cup of coffee before I deal with this."

He knew he was in for it on his way back upstairs, even before he reached his floor. The clamor of their shrieks echoed in the corridor. He could hear Aziz shouting at them in Arabic and French, warning them that when the Inspector arrived they'd better be still and behave.

"Shut up," he yelled, walking back into his office. "This is a department of criminal investigation, not a zoo."

He looked at them, fixed each one of them in turn. Pumpkin Pie, in a soiled undershirt, held himself with the arrogance of a hustler who felt himself desired. The old whore was pathetic—fat and wasted, her face contorted in a toothless grin. The two children were beautiful, but Hamid knew they were capable of infinite lies. And the Codds—Hamid recognized the grimace of shame. Their clothing was disheveled, their faces stained with mercurochrome dots. The famous old Irish playwright and his wife sat as proudly as they could, determined, he could see, to brave things out.

"A sorry-looking group," he said to Aziz in French. "Is anybody injured? Is everyone all right?"

"Superficial cuts, Inspector. Our officers were beaten worst of all."

"The old bugger hit me with his walking stick," said Pumpkin Pie. "I'm going to sue him for damages as soon as I'm released."

"What makes you think you're going to be released?" Hamid asked.

"They're perverts, Inspector. Can't you see?"

"He says the two of you are perverts," Hamid said in English to the Codds.

"He did, did he? Well—he's a blackmailer." Codd brandished his fist. "He tried to frame us. He ought to be locked away."