Casablanca Blues (2013) (13 page)

Ghita sat, or rather she perched, on the edge of a grey leather chair. Coaxing herself to remain composed, she pressed her palms together.

‘I am turning to you for help,’ she said, ‘as my father’s close friend.’

Senbel didn’t reply at first. He looked at Ghita, his manner taciturn and cold.

‘Your father’s plan to root out corruption has backfired dramatically,’ he replied. ‘We all knew it would, and we warned him – but he didn’t listen.’

‘He is a patriot,’ Ghita said, her voice straining. ‘He loves his country and is the only one of you willing to stand up against the evil that’s eating it from the inside out.’

The lawyer held out his wrists.

‘You can take me away if you believe I have done anything wrong,’ he said.

‘It’s not you, but the system... and you’re part of it.’

‘My dear Ghita, if you chop down the forest, nature begins to fight back. It sends pestilence and plague. This may not be nature, but it’s the same thing.’ Senbel paused, took a deep breath, and sighed. ‘The drugs they found... it wasn’t a gram or two of
kif
. It was a massive haul, and of heroin at that.’

Ghita’s mouth contorted in a snarl.

‘You know as well as I do it was planted there!’

‘Of course it was.’

‘So what are we going to do about it?’

‘
Wait
. We have to wait.’

‘Wait for what?’

Driss Senbel groomed a strand of hair over his bald patch.

‘Your father’s assets have been seized,’ he said. ‘Everything is frozen. His home, his companies, his private jet...
everything
.’

‘So let’s get them unfrozen!’

Senbel picked a silver letter-opener from the surface of his desk. It had an ivory handle and a hallmarked blade.

‘These people we are dealing with,’ he said, ‘they are extremely dangerous.’

‘What people?’

‘The ones your father has so enraged.’

‘But who are they?’

‘They’re gangsters, gangsters with the cloak of respectability.’

‘Do they have a leader?’

‘All I know are the rumours...’

‘And what do the rumours say?’

‘That they take their lead from a man known to them as the Falcon.’

‘I must meet him. I’ll plead with him if I have to.’

‘He won’t listen. None of them will. And in any case, you’ll never find him.’

The lawyer ran the blade across his palm.

‘The police, the politicians, businessmen, they all live in terror of him,’ he said. ‘The Falcon controls the system. He
owns
it... even powerful wealthy men like your father have no hope against him.
Why
? Because his power is not constructed from anything logical. You see, it’s power derived from raw fear.’

There was a knock at the door.

The receptionist entered with a memo for Senbel to sign. Striding indifferently through the room, she glared at Ghita as she approached her employer. A moment or two later she was gone.

‘There’s a huge storm approaching,’ the lawyer said. ‘It’s going to be a tempest, a perfect storm. All I can do is to warn you while you can. Leave Casablanca while you still can. Go very far away.’

‘And let my father languish in jail?’

‘I suppose so.’

There was rage in Ghita’s eyes.

‘I’m not frightened of this man, this Falcon,’ she said. ‘I’m not frightened of anyone.’

Fifty-six

Taking the shoeshine boy’s advice, Mortimer Wu went across to Hotel Marrakech, and soon found himself installed in the room opposite Blaine’s.

Opening the window, he stared out at the flower stalls on the edge of the market. Then he lay on the bed, closed his eyes, and thought back to Hong Kong once again.

An hour or two passed and Wu didn’t move.

By remaining completely still he found that the anxiety and the fear subsided. But, as dusk fell over Casablanca he pushed back his shoulders and pulled himself off the bed.

He glanced down at the market.

The flower sellers were packing up, draining their buckets into the gutters, bundling up the roses for another day.

There were footsteps out in the corridor.

Wu put his ear to the door. He listened, and opened it a crack. A man was fumbling for his key at the room opposite.

‘Hello,’ he said, in a friendly voice – an American voice.

‘Good evening,’ Wu replied, opening the door wide.

‘You new here?’

‘Yeah. Just arrived this afternoon.’

‘How are you liking the faded grandeur of Hotel Marrakech?’

Mortimer Wu didn’t respond to the question. Instead, he asked:

‘Is there any hot water?’

‘Hot water? Are you crazy?’ said Blaine with a grin. ‘You’re lucky if you get any water at all – hot or cold.’

‘Can you direct me to the shower?’

‘Sure. It’s all the way down the hall.’

‘Thank you,’ Wu replied, before withdrawing into his room.

Shutting the door, he slid the bolt firmly into place.

Left standing there, his own door open, Blaine plodded down the corridor to relieve himself.

On the way back, he wondered whether to reach out, to invite the newcomer for a glass of
café noir
down at Baba Cool.

He was about to knock, when he heard a commotion down in the lobby. The front door slammed hard, and was followed by the cacophonous cry of cats.

Leaving his room open, Blaine hurried down.

The ever-present clerk wasn’t laid out on the floor in his usual state of delirium. He wasn’t there at all. Blaine peered on the floor behind the desk, but there was no sign of the clerk.

The cats seemed uneasy.

A few of them had their ears pricked up, alert, poised low as if ready for flight. One or two had leapt up to higher ground, and were perched on a high shelf. They were quite obviously spooked.

Eventually, Blaine went back upstairs, and slipped back into his room. He cursed the damp, the cold, and the stench. Then his mind turned to Ghita. Even though the thought of her made his blood churn, he wished she were there.

Pulling on his Humphrey Bogart raincoat, fedora in hand, he went out into the corridor again.

Across from his room the Chinese backpacker’s door was ajar.

Rehearsing a line of invitation in his head, Blaine knocked, pushed the door open and swung his head in.

Mortimer Wu was lying on the bed, face up. There was an odd oily, almost metallic smell, and the curtains were drawn shut. Frowning, Blaine flicked on the light.

He leapt back in terror.

The backpacker’s throat had been slashed. His clothing and the moth-eaten blanket were soaked in fresh blood.

Blaine screeched. It was a high-pitched girlie scream, the kind from Tom and Jerry cartoons, when the woman sees the mouse.

He stood there for what seemed like an eternity, his feet rooted to the bare floorboards, every nerve in his body in shock.

Then he panicked.

Something was telling him to get out, to run.

But do so and he’d be a suspect. This isn’t America, he thought. Things don’t work like that here!

So, shaking, he ran back to his room, grabbed his satchel and the bin-liner.

Sprinting down the stairs, he rushed out through the front door of Hotel Marrakech.

Fifty-seven

Patricia Ross had spent the day petitioning Casablanca’s Governor to release Hicham Omary, but without any luck. Baying for blood, he was in no mood for clemency.

At six p.m. she drove back to the Globalcom headquarters, an attaché case under her arm. She was tired, frustrated and fearful. It felt as though the walls were closing in, as though the enemies were everywhere. As the CEO’s assistant, Ross knew it was only a matter of time before the authorities tried to implicate her as well.

On the ground floor, five uniformed police officers were standing guard in a line. Ross was no expert on Moroccan law enforcement, but they appeared to be better equipped than usual, armed with semi-automatic weapons.

Before she could get to the elevator, a plain-clothes officer stopped her.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Up to my office.’

‘At this late hour?’

Ross rolled her eyes.

‘We’re in the news business,’ she said. ‘The news doesn’t stop.’

‘What’s in your case?’

‘Papers, documents, that’s all.’

The officer waved her through. She took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor, placed the attaché case on her desk, and looked out at the lights of Casablanca below. In any other job she might have quit right then, but Hicham Omary had been a mentor to her, a boss with a vision.

She sat down, put her head in her hands, and tried to think straight.

How could she help him?

Without meaning to, she thought of the first time they’d met. It was in Paris at the Musée Jacquemart-André.

Omary had been alone, taking a quick tour through the picture gallery between meetings nearby. They had both been drawn to the same painting, a self-portrait of Nélie Jacquemart, her long graceful form in profile.

From the first moment she saw Omary, Patricia Ross had been struck by his gentleness, and by his love of fine things.

They had taken tea in the museum’s salon and, the next thing she knew, she was working for him in Casablanca.

A dozen memories flashed through, all of them featuring Omary, a man of astonishing courtesy and good taste. Ross had never met anyone quite like him, either in intellectual capacity, or in the way he always seemed to be three steps ahead of the game. The news business suited him more than anyone alive.

Ross glanced at her reflection in the window. She could feel the establishment closing ranks. It was just a matter of time before they took her in. But she knew how Omary had a sixth sense, a sense of how a situation would be played out, a sense learned on the way up from the streets.

Logging into her laptop, Patricia Ross squinted at her emails, and swore out loud. Her account had been hacked. Thousands of filed messages were missing. She was about to slam the laptop shut, when a random email caught her eye.

It was from Jacques Mart.

She clicked on the message. It was blank, except for a single character way down the page – a question mark, highlighted as a hyperlink. She clicked it, and a web site opened. It was password protected.

Without thinking, Ross typed in the name
Jacquemart
.

The screen went blank. Then, a moment later, it came alive with dozens of dossiers, titled with some of the most important names in the land.

‘My God, Hicham, you’re amazing!’ she exclaimed.

Opening one of the files at random, she found scans of secret bank statements, illicit video footage, and proof of bribe-taking on a grand scale.

At the bottom of the page was an instruction. It read:

MAKE PUBLIC AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

Fifty-eight

For more than three hours Blaine walked the streets, replaying the sight of Mortimer Wu with his throat slashed.

Time and again, he set off back to Hotel Marrakech, each time stopping just short. On the last abortive return, he saw a cluster of uniformed officers standing outside, and the stoned-out clerk being interrogated on the pavement, a fluffy white cat pulled tight to his chest.

Blaine’s gut told him to bide his time, because whoever killed the backpacker might still be there, waiting for him. He thought of going to the American consulate and explaining it all. But, again, instinct warned against it. He needed somewhere quiet; somewhere he could lie low and think.

He thought of Ghita and her apartment. It may have been wretched, but at least it was silent – the last place he would be disturbed. As for Ghita, she may have been a pain in the backside, but she spoke fluent English.

Making sure no one was following him, and dressed in the fedora and raincoat, Blaine hurried to the apartment building opposite Baba Cool. He slipped into the entranceway, and ran up the stairs, groping his way up the curved wall as he went.

There was no light under Ghita’s door, but he knocked anyway.

Silence.

Blaine sucked air through his teeth, squatted down on his satchel, his forehead streaming with sweat.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said aloud. ‘What do I do now?’

Fifty-nine

At Globalcom headquarters, Patricia Ross copied the dossiers, and sent them to WikiLeaks, with an embargo until ten p.m. GMT.

Then she sent them to every newshound she could think of – in Morocco and abroad.

After that, she hurried upstairs to the newsroom and cornered Adam Binbin, the only editor she could completely trust.

‘What have you got on the line-up tonight?’

Binbin logged on, skimming the schedule as he stirred his tea.

‘A Chinese student’s been murdered downtown – it’s a suspected robbery gone wrong. Then some political stuff and a whole lot of sport – the opium of the people.’

‘I need to ask a favour, a big favour,’ said Ross, touching a hand to the back of her head.

Binbin took a sip of the tea, picked another sugar-lump from the saucer and dropped it in.

‘I’ve got a huge story that has to go out...
tonight
.’

‘Bigger than a murdered tourist?’

Ross leaned in close.

‘This is as big as it gets,’ she said.

Sixty

Ghita had crisscrossed Boulevard Mohammed V all evening, checking the cafés and the dingy drinking dens tucked away in the backstreets. She might have been repulsed by the derelict men who patronized them, but her mind wasn’t on judgement. Rather, it was on finding someone who could lead her to the Falcon.

Behind the market she came to an especially run-down bar. There was no name outside. And, in place of a door, a curtain hung fashioned from what looked like strands of bath chain. Ghita peered inside, into the cumulonimbus haze of cigarette smoke.

In varying stages of inebriation, half a dozen men were reclining on broken chairs, nursing half-empty bottles of Flag Spéciale. A couple of loose ladies were attempting unsuccessfully to drum up business.

On the floor near the bar, a man was having his shoes cleaned. Ghita recognized the shoeshine box, which had a gold cross on the side. She stormed in and tapped Saed on the neck.